Phonological processes tend to involve local dependencies, an observation that has been expressed explicitly or implicitly in many phonological theories, such as the use of minimal symbols in SPE and the inclusion of primarily strictly local constraints in Optimality Theory. I propose a learning-based account of local phonological processes, providing an explicit computational model. The model is grounded in experimental results that suggest children are initially insensitive to long-distance dependencies and that as their ability to track non-adjacent dependencies grows, learners still prefer local generalisations to non-local ones. The model encodes these results by constructing phonological processes starting around an alternating segment and expanding outward to incorporate more phonological context only when surface forms cannot be predicted with sufficient accuracy. The model successfully constructs local phonological generalisations and exhibits the same preference for local patterns that humans do, suggesting that locality can emerge as a computational consequence of a simple learning procedure.

The ambition of this article is to provide a phonological account of an intricate pattern of lenition and gemination in Campidanese Sardinian. The data show two things: that a model of phonology needs some way of showing strength and weakness as positional effects and that neither can be reliably understood in phonetic terms. In this analysis, the discovery procedure does not depend on raw phonetic facts, but rather on a rich model of abstract phonological representations. These representations are of two kinds, melodic and prosodic, and they allow for a substance-free phonological analysis of lenition and fortition in Campidanese that is not confronted by the difficulties inherent in surface-oriented approaches.

We review and elaborate an account of consonantal strength that is founded on the model of speech as a modulated carrier signal. The stronger the consonant, the greater the modulation. Unlike approaches based on sonority or articulatory aperture, the account offers a uniform definition of the phonetic effect lenition has on consonants: All types of lenition (such as debuccalisation, spirantisation and vocalisation) reduce the extent to which a consonant modulates the carrier. To demonstrate the quantifiability of this account, we present an analysis of Ibibio, in which we investigate the effects of lenition on the amplitude, periodicity and temporal properties of consonants. We propose a method for integrating these different acoustic dimensions within an overall measure of modulation size. Not only does the modulated-carrier account cover all the classically recognised lenition types, but it also encompasses loss of plosive release in final stops – which, although not traditionally classed as lenition, is clearly related to processes that are.

Do inputs need to be restricted on a language-specific basis? Classic Optimality Theory claims that they do not: the rich base is filtered by constraints that yield full contrast, complementary distributions or positional neutralisation depending on the ranking. The problem arises when positional neutralisation affects a gappy contrast. In Russian, voicing neutralisation works on all obstruents alike, including non-contrastively voiceless ones – but it creates voiced allophones that are otherwise disallowed. In the popular OT account of positional neutralisation, analysing these cases requires handling voicing twice: once for all segments, then again for gaps. I argue that the solution is to relax the rich base assumption by ruling gaps out at the UR level through morpheme structure constraints (Halle 1959 et seq.).

Recent studies have shown that sound-symbolic patterns can be modelled using phonological theory. The purpose of the current study is to describe a new Japanese nicknaming pattern, pime-yobi, wherein [h] alternates with [p] to express cuteness, and to model it using Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar. The current study, building on the analysis of Alderete & Kochetov (2017), proposes a sound-symbolic constraint, Express[p], which requires output forms to contain [p]. The results of two experiments show that Japanese speakers found names containing [p]s to be cuter than those without them and that pime-yobi nicknaming exhibits intra- and inter-speaker variation in acceptability and cuteness. Based on these results, theoretical analysis shows that the weight of Express[p] varies both across different speakers and within the same speaker.

Chong (2017) claims that a derived environment process is productive to the extent that it is supported by phonotactics. The present study tests this claim by comparing variable patterns observed in Korean vowel harmony of suffix alternation with vowel co-occurrence restrictions in the lexicon. A corpus study replicated findings of previous studies that the harmony in suffix alternation is losing productivity, conditioned by the quality of the stem vowel, the number of intervening consonants between the vowels and the stem class. Phonotactic generalisations in vowel sequences matched such tendencies in the alternation in that harmony was feeble in phonotactics and that some of the factors that modulate the harmony in alternation were found to affect the harmony in phonotactics as well. The findings generally support Chong’s claim that lack of phonotactic support for an alternation makes it harder to learn.

Feature-based models of sign language use distinctive features to describe the phonological structure of signs. We use near-minimal pairs and phonological phenomena like productivity and neutralisation in French Sign Language to show that the feature [web], which refers to the webbing part of the fingers, should be (re)introduced into the list of phonologically active features. In discussing potential cases of [web] in other sign languages and the impact on the shape of phonological inventories, we first offer an account of [web] in terms of a location feature in line with most traditional feature-geometry models. We then offer some speculations on why a more uniform characterisation of [web] and the features in the same subclass in terms of the orientation type results in more economical models.

Non-linguistic pattern learning uses distinct implicit and explicit processes, which differ in behavioural signatures, inductive biases and proposed model architectures. This study asked whether both processes are available in phonotactic learning in the lab. Five Internet experiments collected generalisation, learning curves, response times and detailed debriefings from 671 valid participants. Implicit and explicit learners were found in all conditions and experiments. Objective measures of implicit vs. explicit learning were correlated with introspective self-report. Participants spontaneously discovered and named phonetic features. These findings contradict the common (usually tacit) assumption that ‘artificial-language’ participants learn only implicitly. Learning mode also affected inductive bias: Implicit learning improved performance on family-resemblance patterns relative to biconditionals (if-and-only-if, exclusive-or) in two experiments. The direction of this effect is unexpected under many current theories of how implicit and explicit concept learning differ, and is consistent with models of explicit learning which take pattern-irrelevant features into account.

It has been proposed that there are cognitive biases in language learning that favour certain patterns over others. This study examines the effects of such bias factors on the learning of the phonology of proper nouns. I take up the phenomenon of compound voicing in Japanese surnames. The results of two judgment experiments show that, while Japanese speakers replicate various kinds of statistical regularities in existing names, they tend to extend only phonologically motivated patterns to novel names. This suggests that phonological naturalness plays a role even in the learning of a highly faithful category of words, namely proper nouns, and provides evidence for the relevance of learning biases in synchronic grammar.