Mind The Gap Inductive Biases In Phonological Feature Learning

Although extensive research has been done into the acquisition of non-linguistic feature combinations, empirical evidence about phonological feature learning is scarce. I present results from learning experiments in which participants learnt a data set with the internal structure of a plosive segment inventory. The outcomes suggest that learning biases may indeed play a role in phonological typology, and that learners reduce the cumulative complexity in the data set considerably. These results support the hypothesis that the reduction of complexity is a driving force in the evolution of language.