TY - JOUR A1 - Baer-Henney, Dinah A1 - Kügler, Frank A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben T1 - The Interaction of Language-Specific and Universal Factors During the Acquisition of Morphophonemic Alternations With Exceptions JF - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society N2 - Using the artificial language paradigm, we studied the acquisition of morphophonemic alternations with exceptions by 160 German adult learners. We tested the acquisition of two types of alternations in two regularity conditions while additionally varying length of training. In the first alternation, a vowel harmony, backness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix. This process is grounded in substance (phonetic motivation), and this universal phonetic factor bolsters learning a generalization. In the second alternation, tenseness of the stem vowel determines backness of the suffix vowel. This process is not based in substance, but it reflects a phonotactic property of German and our participants benefit from this language-specific factor. We found that learners use both cues, while substantive bias surfaces mainly in the most unstable situation. We show that language-specific and universal factors interact in learning. KW - Phonology KW - Exceptional alternation KW - Acquisition KW - Substance KW - Phonotactics KW - Artificial language paradigm Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12209 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 39 IS - 7 SP - 1537 EP - 1569 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER -