Tuesday 29th October, 11.00-12.30, B21 7 George Square

Klaas Seinhorst – The learnability of phoneme inventories

I will present my PhD project “The learnability of phoneme inventories”, which I started at the University of Amsterdam in September 2012. The starting point of my project was the observation that languages have strong preferences for certain sets of plosive sounds, while other sets are extremely rare. In the experiments I plan to conduct, human participants will learn sets of linguistic stimuli analogous to sound systems – both frequent and infrequent ones; using iterated learning, I will monitor the evolution of these sets and compare the outcomes to typological data. If the experimental findings comply with the typological results, this would point to an important role of learning biases in phonological typology.

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