Harmony is a process by which a feature spreads throughout a word or some other domain. The segment that initiates harmony is referred to as the trigger, and those that undergo harmony are its targets. Some segments seemingly do not participate in harmony; these are called neutral segments, and they are of two types. Transparent segments are those that do not undergo harmony but do not stop it ...

The current paper presents the results of a preliminary survey of vowel harmony systems. The purpose of this survey is to gain a better understanding of transparency in vowel harmony; both vowel transparency and glide transparency. In §2, I lay out how I selected the languages for inclusion in the current survey of harmony systems. Additionally, I outline what information I collected about each...

English is not typically considered to be a vowel harmony language, and yet one of its cousins, Buchan Scots, clearly shows vowel-harmonic patterns. This involves type height which blocked by certain consonants consonant clusters (which do form natural class). The front /ɪ/ has historically functioned as high but seems have changed into non-high in the inland dialectal variant. article consider...

The present study explores learning phonological alternations that contain exceptions. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony pattern in which a regular suffix followed harmony, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and an exceptional suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experim...

The issue of Bantu vowel height harmony is one that most serious theories of phonology have addressed at one time or another. As is quite well-known, the majority of an estimated 500± Bantu languages exhibit some variant of a progressive harmony process by which vowels lower when preceded by an appropriate (lower) trigger. In this paper I have three goals. First, I present a comprehensive treat...