<OT> New Posting: ROA-1054

[roa at ruccs.rutgers.edu]

ROA 1054-1009

Natural and unnatural constraints in Hungarian vowel harmony

Bruce Hayes <bhayes at humnet.ucla.edu>
Kie Zuraw <kie at ucla.edu>
Péter Siptár <siptar at nytud.hu>
Zsuzsa Londe <zsuzsalonde at gmail.com>

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1054


Abstract:
Phonological constraints can, in principle, be classified
according to whether they are natural (founded in principles
of Universal Grammar (UG)) or unnatural (arbitrary, learned
inductively from the language data).  Recent work has used
this distinction as the basis for arguments about the role
of UG in learning.  Some languages have phonological patterns
that arguably reflect unnatural constraints.  With experimental
testing, one can assess whether such patterns are actually
learned by native speakers.  Becker, Ketrez, and Nevins
(2007), testing speakers of Turkish, suggest that they do
indeed go unlearned.  They interpret this result with a
strong UG position:  humans are unable to learn data patterns
not backed by UG principles.


This article pursues the same research line, locating similarly
unnatural data patterns in the vowel harmony system of Hungarian,
such as the tendency (among certain stem types) for a final
bilabial stop to favor front harmony.  Our own test leads
to the opposite conclusion to Becker et al.:  Hungarians
evidently do learn the unnatural patterns.


To conclude we consider a bias account—that speakers are
able to learn unnatural environments, but devalue them relative
to natural ones.  We outline a method for testing the strength
of constraints as learned by speakers against the strength
of the corresponding patterns in the lexicon, and show that
it offers tentative support for the hypothesis that unnatural
constraints are disfavored by language learners.

Comments: Preprint of article to appear in Language
Keywords: Hungarian, vowel harmony, naturalness, wug test, variation
Areas: Phonology,Learnability,Psycholinguistics
Type: Journal Article

Direct link: http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?roa=1054