Finley
Biographic Data
| ID | 41997 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Finley |
| FAMILY NAME | Finley |
| SIGNATURE | FINLEY |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pacific Lutheran University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7090-8108 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Biases for Vowel Harmony Over Disharmony in Phoneme Monitoring
Previous research exploring the learnability of vowel harmony (a phonetically natural pattern) and vowel disharmony (a phonetically unnatural pattern) has shown mixed evidence for a naturalness bias. This study aims to clarify these mixed results by introducing a more sensitive and indirect measure of learning—a modified phoneme monitoring task. Participants listened to CV-me/CV-mo words and pressed a button to indicate the final vowel (either [e…
Modeling harmony biases in learning exceptions to vowel harmony
Artificial language learning experiments typically show non-categorical results after training on categorical data. This is generally due to incomplete learning, but these results can also reveal biases. One example is that participants trained on a vowel harmony language with alternating and non-alternating affixes prefer the non-alternating affix in harmonic contexts (Finley 2021). In this paper, I show that (i) the preference for harmonic item…
Probabilistic phonology: A review of theoretical perspectives, applications, and problems
Probability and frequency are becoming increasingly important in phonological analysis. This article reviews contemporary perspectives on how phonological theory addresses gradient phonological patterns shaped by probability and frequency, drawing on theories of the lexicon, grammar, and statistics. After examining their motivations, we show how these diverse theoretical perspectives have been applied to a variety of problems in core phonology, i…
Gender bias in morphological inferences
The present study explores how language learners apply gender stereotypes in learning a novel language with grammatical gender. Adult, English-speaking participants were exposed to picture–sound pairs from a miniature language. Each picture was of a matched gendered professional (e.g., male tennis player, female tennis player) with a nonsense form [CVCV-go/gu]. Participants were exposed to 32 picture–sound pairs (16 male, and 16 female, all match…
Generalization to Novel Consonants: Place Versus Voice
Coarticulation and learnability of transparent vowels in vowel harmony
The representations of transparent vowels in vowel harmony have been of interest to phonologists because of the challenges they pose for constraints on locality and complexity. One proposal is that transparent vowels in back vowel harmony may be intermediate between front and back. The present study uses two artificial language learning experiments to explore the psychological reality of acoustic differences in transparent vowels in back vs. fron…
Learning Exceptions in Phonological Alternations
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 obeyed a vowel harmony rule, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and a non-alternating suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experiment 1 learned the behavior of both suff…
The need for abstraction in phonology: A commentary on Ambridge (2020)
In this commentary, I discuss why, despite the existence of gradience in phonetics and phonology, there is still a need for abstract representations. Most proponents of exemplar models assume multiple levels of abstraction, allowing for an integration of the gradient and the categorical. Ben Ambridge’s dismissal of generative models such as Optimality Theory (OT) is problematic because OT not only allows for the abstract, but can also handle a va…
The Role of Anti-harmony in Learning Neutral Vowels
The present study used an artificial grammar learning paradigm to explore the prediction that exposure to anti-harmony might help learners infer that a neutral vowel in a vowel harmony language is transparent. Participants were exposed to a back/round harmony language with a neutral vowel [a]. This neutral vowel either always selected a back vowel suffix, always selected a front vowel suffix, or selected both front-and back vowel suffixes, in adh…
Perceptually Based Constraints and Metathesis: Evidence from Artificial Grammar
The present paper explores the role of sonority and other perceptual constraints in governing syllable structure constraints. One of the most important issues in phonology today is the formalization of the phonetic grounding of markedness constraints (Hayes and Steriade 2004). Sonority constraints have been particularly controversial because there is no formalized definition of sonority, but rather several different contributing factors, such as …
Locality and harmony: Perspectives from artificial grammar learning
Harmony is one of the most researched phenomena in phonological theory, mainly due to its iterative, nonlocal nature. In this review, I summarize several of the key issues in harmony that can be addressed using an artificial grammar learning approach, including differences between consonant and vowel harmony, transparent and opaque neutral vowels, computational complexity of attested and unattested harmony patterns, and morphological and phonetic…
Generalization Beyond Similarity: Support for Abstract Phonology
The present paper provides evidence from an artificial grammar learning task that supports abstract representations for phonology. Learners exposed to a novel back/round vowel harmony pattern were able to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical items that contained novel affixes, even though participants rated these novel items as highly dissimilar to exposure items. These results suggest that learners do not use exemplar-based notions…
Consequences of monotonicity: Representations and learnability
Learning nonadjacent dependencies in phonology: Transparent vowels in vowel harmony
Nonadjacent dependencies are an important part of the structure of language. While the majority of syntactic and phonological processes occur at a local domain, there are several processes that appear to apply at a distance, posing a challenge for theories of linguistic structure. This article addresses one of the most common nonadjacent phenomena in phonology: transparent vowels in vowel harmony. Vowel harmony occurs when adjacent vowels are req…
"The Meaning of Mother in Louis Farrakhan's "Mother Wheel: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Cosmology of the Nation of Islam's UFO
This article uses a history of religions approach and an integrative psychoanalysis procedure in order to demonstrate that Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan's 1985 abduction narrative of being carried into Mother Wheel-which he claims can be apprehended as an unidentified flying object-is the most important religious event in the life of the minister. This Wheel, and its adjectival modifier "Mother," is central to understanding cosmolo…
Exceptions in vowel harmony are local
Morphemic harmony as featural correspondence
Towards a Substantively Biased Theory of Learning
Morphemic harmony as featural correspondence
Learning nonadjacent dependencies in phonology: Transparent vowels in vowel harmony
Nonadjacent dependencies are an important part of the structure of language. While the majority of syntactic and phonological processes occur at a local domain, there are several processes that appear to apply at a distance, posing a challenge for theories of linguistic structure. This article addresses one of the most common nonadjacent phenomena in phonology: transparent vowels in vowel harmony. Vowel harmony occurs when adjacent vowels are req…
Exceptions in vowel harmony are local
Locality and harmony: Perspectives from artificial grammar learning
Harmony is one of the most researched phenomena in phonological theory, mainly due to its iterative, nonlocal nature. In this review, I summarize several of the key issues in harmony that can be addressed using an artificial grammar learning approach, including differences between consonant and vowel harmony, transparent and opaque neutral vowels, computational complexity of attested and unattested harmony patterns, and morphological and phonetic…
Learning Exceptions in Phonological Alternations
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 obeyed a vowel harmony rule, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and a non-alternating suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experiment 1 learned the behavior of both suff…
"The Meaning of Mother in Louis Farrakhan's "Mother Wheel: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Cosmology of the Nation of Islam's UFO
This article uses a history of religions approach and an integrative psychoanalysis procedure in order to demonstrate that Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan's 1985 abduction narrative of being carried into Mother Wheel-which he claims can be apprehended as an unidentified flying object-is the most important religious event in the life of the minister. This Wheel, and its adjectival modifier "Mother," is central to understanding cosmolo…
Towards a Substantively Biased Theory of Learning
Morphemic harmony as featural correspondence
Exceptions in vowel harmony are local
"The Meaning of Mother in Louis Farrakhan's "Mother Wheel: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Cosmology of the Nation of Islam's UFO
This article uses a history of religions approach and an integrative psychoanalysis procedure in order to demonstrate that Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan's 1985 abduction narrative of being carried into Mother Wheel-which he claims can be apprehended as an unidentified flying object-is the most important religious event in the life of the minister. This Wheel, and its adjectival modifier "Mother," is central to understanding cosmolo…
Consequences of monotonicity: Representations and learnability
Learning nonadjacent dependencies in phonology: Transparent vowels in vowel harmony
Nonadjacent dependencies are an important part of the structure of language. While the majority of syntactic and phonological processes occur at a local domain, there are several processes that appear to apply at a distance, posing a challenge for theories of linguistic structure. This article addresses one of the most common nonadjacent phenomena in phonology: transparent vowels in vowel harmony. Vowel harmony occurs when adjacent vowels are req…
Generalization Beyond Similarity: Support for Abstract Phonology
The present paper provides evidence from an artificial grammar learning task that supports abstract representations for phonology. Learners exposed to a novel back/round vowel harmony pattern were able to discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical items that contained novel affixes, even though participants rated these novel items as highly dissimilar to exposure items. These results suggest that learners do not use exemplar-based notions…
Perceptually Based Constraints and Metathesis: Evidence from Artificial Grammar
The present paper explores the role of sonority and other perceptual constraints in governing syllable structure constraints. One of the most important issues in phonology today is the formalization of the phonetic grounding of markedness constraints (Hayes and Steriade 2004). Sonority constraints have been particularly controversial because there is no formalized definition of sonority, but rather several different contributing factors, such as …
Locality and harmony: Perspectives from artificial grammar learning
Harmony is one of the most researched phenomena in phonological theory, mainly due to its iterative, nonlocal nature. In this review, I summarize several of the key issues in harmony that can be addressed using an artificial grammar learning approach, including differences between consonant and vowel harmony, transparent and opaque neutral vowels, computational complexity of attested and unattested harmony patterns, and morphological and phonetic…
The Role of Anti-harmony in Learning Neutral Vowels
The present study used an artificial grammar learning paradigm to explore the prediction that exposure to anti-harmony might help learners infer that a neutral vowel in a vowel harmony language is transparent. Participants were exposed to a back/round harmony language with a neutral vowel [a]. This neutral vowel either always selected a back vowel suffix, always selected a front vowel suffix, or selected both front-and back vowel suffixes, in adh…
The need for abstraction in phonology: A commentary on Ambridge (2020)
In this commentary, I discuss why, despite the existence of gradience in phonetics and phonology, there is still a need for abstract representations. Most proponents of exemplar models assume multiple levels of abstraction, allowing for an integration of the gradient and the categorical. Ben Ambridge’s dismissal of generative models such as Optimality Theory (OT) is problematic because OT not only allows for the abstract, but can also handle a va…
Coarticulation and learnability of transparent vowels in vowel harmony
The representations of transparent vowels in vowel harmony have been of interest to phonologists because of the challenges they pose for constraints on locality and complexity. One proposal is that transparent vowels in back vowel harmony may be intermediate between front and back. The present study uses two artificial language learning experiments to explore the psychological reality of acoustic differences in transparent vowels in back vs. fron…
Learning Exceptions in Phonological Alternations
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 obeyed a vowel harmony rule, varying between /e/ and /o/ depending on the back/round phonetic features of the stem, and a non-alternating suffix that was always /o/ regardless of the features of the stem vowel. Participants in Experiment 1 learned the behavior of both suff…
Gender bias in morphological inferences
The present study explores how language learners apply gender stereotypes in learning a novel language with grammatical gender. Adult, English-speaking participants were exposed to picture–sound pairs from a miniature language. Each picture was of a matched gendered professional (e.g., male tennis player, female tennis player) with a nonsense form [CVCV-go/gu]. Participants were exposed to 32 picture–sound pairs (16 male, and 16 female, all match…
Generalization to Novel Consonants: Place Versus Voice
Modeling harmony biases in learning exceptions to vowel harmony
Artificial language learning experiments typically show non-categorical results after training on categorical data. This is generally due to incomplete learning, but these results can also reveal biases. One example is that participants trained on a vowel harmony language with alternating and non-alternating affixes prefer the non-alternating affix in harmonic contexts (Finley 2021). In this paper, I show that (i) the preference for harmonic item…
Probabilistic phonology: A review of theoretical perspectives, applications, and problems
Probability and frequency are becoming increasingly important in phonological analysis. This article reviews contemporary perspectives on how phonological theory addresses gradient phonological patterns shaped by probability and frequency, drawing on theories of the lexicon, grammar, and statistics. After examining their motivations, we show how these diverse theoretical perspectives have been applied to a variety of problems in core phonology, i…
Biases for Vowel Harmony Over Disharmony in Phoneme Monitoring
Previous research exploring the learnability of vowel harmony (a phonetically natural pattern) and vowel disharmony (a phonetically unnatural pattern) has shown mixed evidence for a naturalness bias. This study aims to clarify these mixed results by introducing a more sensitive and indirect measure of learning—a modified phoneme monitoring task. Participants listened to CV-me/CV-mo words and pressed a button to indicate the final vowel (either [e…
Phonetics and Phonology Research (15 works) · Linguistics (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Artificial Intelligence (10 works) · Mathematics (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Phonology (9 works) · Vowel (9 works) · Vowel harmony (9 works)