Using the artificial language paradigm, we studied the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations with exceptions by 160 German adult learners. We tested the acquisition of two types of alternations in two regularity conditions while additionally varying length of training. In the first alternation, a vowel harmony, backness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix. This process is g...

Long-distance phonotactics, in which the surface sounds of a language are subject to coocurrence constraints referring to nonadjacent segments, present a difficult learning problem. To acquire such patterns, a learner must find dependencies among distant segments. This paper approaches an idealized version of this problem: how can these patterns even be learned at all? By introducing a learning...

Kalenjin, a Southern Nilotic language, has a harmony system normally associated with the vowel system and specifically with the feature [ATR]. This paper demonstrates that [ATR] is not an appropriate description of the phonetic correlates of the harmony system and that the system operates at least at syllable level, and in many cases at word level. In order to avoid having recourse to feature c...

Examples of non-local phonological processes that are bound by prosodic domains are expected in the world’s phonologies. In other words, we should anticipate cases where the metrical foot constrains vowel harmony. Intuitively, it seems like a natural interaction. However, the notion of vowel harmony bound by the metrical foot has only been sparsely proposed in the literature (Abu-Salim 1987, Hu...

One of the most important foundations of knowing and interpreting the Qur’ān, the Torah, and the Gospel is the belief in the infallibility and impeccability of the words and propositions of these divine scriptures. If the verses and statements of the noble Qur’ān and the Testaments during the revelation era and the ensuing times have been afflicted with distortion and contradiction, then they c...

Processes traditionally described as assimilations fall into two main types according to the impact they have on the informational content of speech signals. In grammar-internal assimilation, exemplified by vowel harmony, sound properties that are suprasegmentally extended have a linguistic marking function. In grammar-external assimilation, exemplified by lenition, the extended properties belo...