On-Line Use of Vowel Harmony as a Word Learning Cue

Uluşahin, Orhun

On-Line Use of Vowel Harmony as a Word Learning Cue

Files

s1025118 _Ulusahin,O_Thesis_journal.pdf (566.83 KB)

Authors

Uluşahin, Orhun

Issue Date

2020-09-01

Language

en

URI

https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/handle/123456789/14654

Abstract

The nature of phonological representations (i.e., abstract vs. episodic) and the role of vowel harmony as a source of abstract information and an on-line process that can influence lexical processing have debated extensively. In the present study, we taught novel pseudowords from one of two palatal harmony categories to native Turkish speakers (N =12) and native Dutch (N = 4) speakers to test whether the former group could generalize their existing knowledge of vowel harmony as a learning cue when learning new harmonious words. The vowels and the vowel harmony system present in the words were modeled on those of Turkish. We hypothesized that native Turkish speakers would learn our words faster, provide more harmony-congruent responses in later tasks, and be more sensitive to disharmonious stimuli in an auditory change detection task. After carrying out several training tasks, participants were able to learn our pseudowords, although we observed no between-group differences in performance in those training tasks. Similarly, we found no significant differences between the two groups in the auditory change detection task. However, in a recognition task, we found that native Turkish speakers mistakenly identified more words belonging to the opposite vowel harmony category as training words. Further, native Turkish speakers were more likely to categorize novel harmonious candidates as possible words in our invented language while categorizing disharmonious candidates as nonwords. Thus, we demonstrated that native Turkish speakers were indeed able to generalize their knowledge of vowel harmony during the learning of novel harmonious words, and that this knowledge was later used during the (false) identification of harmonious words. Our results thus provided support for abstractionist and hybrid theories of phonological representations. Keywords: Vowel harmony, phonological representations, word learning, abstracionist, hybrid, lexical processing.