Open AccessLearnable vs. unlearnable harmony patterns
Author(s) -
Regine Lai
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
lsa annual meeting extended abstracts
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2377-3367
DOI - 10.3765/exabs.v0i0.584
Subject(s) - learnability , phonology , piecewise , harmony (color) , mathematics , computer science , class (philosophy) , vowel harmony , artificial intelligence , linguistics , pure mathematics , algebra over a field , natural language processing , philosophy , physics , mathematical analysis , optics
Phonological patterns have been characterized as regular, and regular patterns are those that are accepted by a finite state machine. However, being regular is only a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition for phonology. Two subregular classes which further restrict the computational properties of phonological patterns have been identified: strictly piecewise (SP), and strictly local (SL). In this study, the learnability of a SP pattern and a pattern from the regular class (but not SP/SL) were tested by using the artificial language learning paradigm, and the results suggest that the identified computational boundaries are psychologically real.