Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Vowel harmony is a class of phonotactic restrictions in which vowels in a language are divided into two or moresubclasses, and words must contain only vowels from only one such subclass regardless of intervening consonants. Languagesworldwide (Turkish, Finnish, Mongolian, Warlpiri, but not English) exhibit vowel harmony. The opacity of such potentiallylong distance alternations poses a challenge for the learner. Nevertheless, infants are sensitive to vowel harmony alternationsat as young as seven months. We present a computational model for vowel harmony acquisition. By normalizing transitionalprobabilities over the vowel tier, and making minimal assumptions about the phonology, we successfully determine which testlanguages have harmony processes and correctly categorize their vowels into harmonizing classes. Using universal typologicalpatterns to inform the search space, we find that phenomena which appear opaque can be captured by simple distributionallearning.