A critical part of infants' ability to acquire any language involves segmenting continuous speech input into discrete word forms. Certain properties of words could provide infants with reliable cues to word boundaries. Here we investigate the potential utility of vowel harmony (VH), a phonological property whereby vowels within a word systematically exhibit similarity ("harmony") for some aspec...

The present study examines two methods for learning and modeling vowel harmony from text corpora. The first uses Expectation Maximization with Hidden Markov Models to find the most probable HMM for a training corpus. The second uses pointwise Mutual Information between distant vowels in a Boltzmann distribution, along with the Minimal Description Length principle to find and model vowel harmony...

sometimes, disharmony among the three powers of sovereignty emerges as an important crisis in political system and reduces its efficiency. in this article, analyzing the disharmony crisis, a theoretical description regarding the main indicators of this crisis has been offered. in the framework of the above mentioned theoretical description the main indicators of the disharmony crisis are 1) the...

This chapter addresses harmony systems, a term which encompasses consonant harmony, vowel harmony, and vowel-consonant harmony. Harmony refers to phonological assimilation for harmonic feature(s) that may operate over a string of multiple segments. This can be construed in one of two ways. Two segments may interact “at a distance” across at least one (apparently) unaffected segment, as shown fo...

The two most controversial aspects of vowel harmony in Korean ideophones are its morphologically restricted nature and the harmonic feature governing these alternations. Not only is the harmony pattern restricted to the ideophone class2, but also the value of the harmonic feature determines the meaning of the ideophone itself. While alternations from one feature to another involve relative lowe...

Moro is a Kordofanian language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. It has a vowel height harmony system that presents an intriguing challenge due to the dual nature of the central schwa vowel. Schwas in some morphemes can trigger vowel harmony, while schwas in other morphemes do not. In addition, schwas can appear with both sets of harmonic vowels within morphemes, raising the issue of wheth...

the relationship between verbs and their arguments is a widely debated topic in linguistics. this important area of research explores current theories of how a verb’s semantics can determine the morphosyntactic realization of its arguments. according to levin (2005) event structure and aspectual structure are the first determining factors in argument realization. so, in this article we aimed to...