Some sounds and sound sequences occur much more frequently in the world's languages (such as /a/ or /p/) while others are rather rare (such as /y/ or /ð/). Likewise, during first language acquisition, infants acquire the more frequent sounds earlier than the less frequent sounds. But why are not all sounds or sound sequences acquired equally well? One explanation for this is a learning bias, specifically a substantive bias, which assumes that those sounds or sound sequences that are easy to produce or to perceive will be acquired more easily than those that are more difficult.

So in this seminar, we will run an empirical study together to test for such a difference in the learnability of vowel harmony vs. vowel disharmony. Thus, you will learn how to prepare and set up a psycholinguistic experiment and how to statistically analyse the data that we gathered.