Abstract
The representations of transparent vowels in vowel harmony have been of interest to phonologists because of the challenges they pose for constraints on locality and complexity. One proposal is that transparent vowels in back vowel harmony may be intermediate between front and back. The present study uses two artificial language learning experiments to explore the psychological reality of acoustic differences in transparent vowels in back vs. front vowel contexts. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony language with a neutral vowel that was spliced so that the F2 was lower in back vowel contexts and higher in front vowel contexts (the Natural condition) or the reverse (the Unnatural condition). While only participants in the Natural condition of Experiment 1 were able to learn the behavior of the transparent vowel relative to a No-Training control, there was no difference between the Natural and Unnatural conditions. In Experiment 2, only participants in the Natural condition learned the vowel harmony pattern, though there were no significant differences between the two conditions. No condition successfully learned the behavior of the transparent vowel in Experiment 2. These results suggest that the effects of small differences in the F2 value of transparent back vowels on learnability are minimal.
Highlights
Vowel harmony is one of the most commonly studied phenomena in phonology, primarily because it poses questions about representation and action at a distance
There were no significant differences between the Natural and Unnatural condition for New-Transparent Back items, and there were no interactions by Condition and test item
Because there was no significant difference between the Natural and the Unnatural conditions for New-Transparent Back vowel items, it is unclear how to interpret the fact that only participants in the Natural condition were significantly different from their control counterpart for New-Transparent Back items
Summary
Vowel harmony is one of the most commonly studied phenomena in phonology, primarily because it poses questions about representation and action at a distance. Vowel harmony is characterized as a non-local process for a variety of reasons. Vowel harmony typically applies only to vowels, skipping consonants (though vowel harmony can interact with consonants, Turkish being a commonly cited example (Clements & Sezer 1982)). In Turkish, an agglutinative language, vowel harmony applies to all suffixes, not just the one closest to the stem (e.g., [ip-ler-in] ‘rope, GenPl’, and [son-lar-ɨn] ‘end, GenPl’) (Clements & Sezer 1982). It is possible for neutral/non-participating vowels to be transparent to vowel harmony. In the case of transparent vowels, harmony ‘skips’ over neutral vowels, thereby adding an additional level of non-locality. In Hungarian, the backness of the dative suffix in [radír-nak] ‘easier-dat’ is determined by the initial stem vowel, and skips over the transparent front vowel (Ringen 1988)
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