Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Vowel harmony denotes a class of phonotactic constraintswhich limit which vowels can co-occur in words. The charac-teristics of harmony systems have been well-researched fromtheoretical, typological, and developmental perspectives. Chil-dren are sensitive to harmony very early in their development,as young as seven months, so the mechanisms responsible forharmony acquisition must be able to identify its presence aswell as the specifics of individual vowel harmony systemswith little input. Prior computational work has sought eitherto detect the presence of harmony without describing the spe-cific implementation or to describe a specific implementationwhen the general details are known beforehand. We presenta new computational acquisition approach inspired by phono-logical notions of restrictiveness which succeeds in automat-ically detecting harmony in some language and describes thegross characteristics of the underlying harmony grammar with-out prior knowledge about the type of system to expect.