Phonology is the study of the sound systems of human language. In this course, we will be interested in phonological knowledge – What is it that an individual knows about a language’s sound system?  – and especially in phonological learning  – How is that knowledge acquired?

We will limit ourselves to receptive phonological knowledge, as demonstrated in perception, word segmentation and off-line judgment tasks, as opposed to speech production. We will have a special focus on laboratory studies of phonological learning in which participants acquire a constructed language. These studies offer the opportunity to test fine-grained hypotheses about phonological learning that would be impossible to study “in the wild”. We will also have a special focus on comparing these artificial phonology learning studies to other concept learning studies from the cognitive psychology literature.

Some of the general issues we hope to better understand are:

1. How can experimental studies inform theories of phonological knowledge and learning?
2. What is the relationship between infant, child, and adult phonological learning?
3. What is the relationship between phonological learning and other kinds of learning?
4. What is the relationship between the degree to which phonological patterns are attested across natural languages and ease of learning of artificial languages?

We will focus on methodologies that our own students can make use of relatively readily: web-based behavioral experiments, and ERP.