Experimentally comparing the learnability of rule interactions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2023/14/0029/000623Keywords:
Opacity, AGL, Learnability, Natural biasAbstract
This paper aims to test the claim that opaque interactions are harder to learn than transparent ones with artificial grammar learning (AGL) experiments and the ‘poverty-of-stimulus’ paradigm. The participants were first taught vowel harmony and palatalisation separately and then tested on whether they preferred to let them feed or counterfeed in ambiguous environments. If transparent interactions are indeed preferred, significantly more subjects should choose the feeding option. Results indicated that significantly more participants preferred the opaque interaction instead, contrary to predictions. Preference for opacity might be attributed to structural simplicity or a dispreference for the application of the palatalisation rule.
References
Baković, E. 2011. Opacity and ordering. In Goldsmith, J., Yu, A., Riggle, J. (eds.), The Handbook of Phonological Theory (2nd ed.), 40-67. Oxford: Blackwell.
Brooks, K. M., Pajak, B., Baković, E. 2013. Learning biases for phonological interactions. The 2013 Annual Meeting on Phonology. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Ettlinger, M. 2008. Input-driven Opacity. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Hayes, B. 2004. Phonological acquisition in optimality theory: The early stages. In Kager, R., Pater, J., Zonneveld, W. (eds.), Fixing Priorities: Constraints in Phonological Acquisition, 158-203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kim, Y. J. 2012. Do learners prefer transparent rule ordering? An artificial language learning study. In Beltrama, A., Chatzikonstantinou, T., Lee, J. L., Pham, M., Rak, D. (eds.), Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the CLS, 375-386. Chicago, USA.
Kiparsky, P. 1976. Abstractness, opacity, and global rules. In Koutsoudas, A. (ed.), The Ordering and Application of Rules. Mouton.
Pater, J., Moreton, E. 2012. Structurally biased phonology: Complexity in learning and typology. In Vijayakrishnan, K. G. (ed.), A Special Issue of the EFL Journal on Phonology, 1-44.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
