Structural Biases in Phonology: Infant and Adult Evidence from Artificial Language Learning

Do biases in infant and adult language learning follow (or better yet, follow from) typological biases observed cross-linguistically? The evidence obtained thus far has been equivocal; the present study examines a previously uninvestigated type of bias: are certain phonological processes preferentially associated with certain positions in the word? In particular, do different phonological processes invoke different notions of finality? We investigated this question by switching the environments between two phonological processes (final devoic- ing and final stress) and testing adults and infants on their learning preferences between the typologically attested and unattested generalizations.