Speaker: Bingzi Yu (MIT)
Title: Studying naturalness bias in transmission and communication with ALL experiments
Time: Monday, October 2nd, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: Phonetic substance is believed to affect phonological grammar through acquisition. Patterns with a clear phonetic motivation are considered more natural and also typologically more frequent. While the hypothesis suggests a bias towards more natural patterns, experimental evidence has been inconsistent. In this talk, I will report the results of two Artificial Language Learning (ALL) experiments. With vowel harmony (natural) and vowel disharmony (unnatural) as the target patterns, the two experiments investigated naturalness bias in the context of transmission and communication. The first experiment found a similar decreasing tendency of both patterns over time, whereas the second one revealed a bias effect during interaction. The mixed results show the weakness of naturalness bias, in line with previous work, and highlight the impact of communicative context on the functioning of bias.