Domain specificity in learning phonology

The main goal of this research is to find evidence for or against the claim that humans employ a distinct learning mechanism for phonology. The learnability of logically possible phonotactic patterns was examined in experimental settings using the artificial language learning paradigm. The findings of these experiments support the idea that there is a distinct learning mechanism for phonology (as opposed to syntax) as the phonological learning mechanism is subject to computational constraints that do not appear to be found in syntactic and visual pattern learning.;Three series of experiments were conducted. The first series of experiments were designed to test the learnability of a pattern found in natural language syntax, but not in the phonology of any human language. The pattern was realized over sentences (syntactic context) and over words (phonotactic context), and the results show that human subjects were only able to learn this pattern if it was presented in syntactic context. These results support the idea that the learning mechanism for phonology is different from the one for learning syntax, and the absence of this pattern in phonology is due to the computational restrictions of a phonological learner.;The second series of experiments were designed to examine and compare the learnability of a particular phonologically plausible sound pattern which is not found in any natural languages and its counterpart which is found in natural languages. The results from this experiment show that the unattested phonotactic pattern was more challenging to learn than the attested phonotactic pattern. These results suggest that the phonological learning mechanism is subject to even stricter computational constraints than those observed in the first series of experiments.;The third series of experiments were carried out to investigate whether the same learning restrictions revealed by the results of the second set of experiments also apply to the non-linguistic domains. The same pattern tested in the second series of experiments were embedded in sequences of shapes (visual context), and in sequences of drumbeats (auditory context). The results show that the computational constraints of a phonological learning mechanism were also observed in the non-linguistic auditory learner, but not in the visual pattern learner. This could imply that the phonological learner and the non-linguistic auditory share some but not necessarily all properties.;The specific patterns tested are well-understood and well-motivated from the perspective of theoretical linguistics and theoretical computer science. The results from these experiments provide insights into the properties of human's phonological learning mechanisms and advance the debate between domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms for human learning.