Variation awaiting bias: Substantively biased learning of vowel harmony variation

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Phonology

Background:

• Children's language acquisition often involves simplifying or regularizing linguistic patterns.
• The concept of 'naturalness' in phonology suggests certain patterns are inherently more likely or easier to acquire.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if children learning an artificial language adapt variable phonological patterns towards more natural forms.
• To examine children's acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern in artificial languages.

Main Methods:

• Children were exposed to two artificial languages with differing dominance of a rounding harmony pattern.
• Production data from child learners were analyzed to observe pattern acquisition and alteration.
• Adult production patterns were used as a baseline for comparison.

Main Results:

• Children consistently favored the harmony pattern in their production across both artificial languages.
• In the language where harmony was non-dominant, children's production shifted to predominantly feature harmony.
• This pattern reversal in children contrasted significantly with adult production.

Conclusions:

• Children learning artificial languages demonstrate a bias towards phonological harmony.
• This acquisition pattern suggests children impose phonetic naturalness on variable linguistic input.
• Findings align with regularization observed in child morphosyntactic learning, highlighting naturalness in phonological development.