Learning Exceptions in Phonological Alternations

The present study explores learning phonological alternations that contain exceptions. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony pattern in which a regular suffix obeyed a vowel harmony rule, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and a non-alternating suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experiment 1 learned the behavior of both suffixes, but correct performance for the non-alternating suffix was higher when the suffix happened to be in harmony with the stem. Participants in Experiment 2 were exposed to the non-alternating affix in harmonic contexts only, and continued to show a bias towards harmony. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with minimal training on disharmonic cases of the non-alternating morpheme. However, participants were less likely to learn the alternating affix without exposure to morphological stem, stem + suffix alternations in Experiment 4, suggesting a bias towards morphophonological alternations in learning vowel harmony patterns.