{"id":4000,"date":"2026-01-19T10:12:03","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T02:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/?p=4000"},"modified":"2026-01-19T13:27:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T05:27:12","slug":"exploring-the-neural-network-implementation-of-phonological-systems-insights-from-vowel-harmony-and-disharmony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/archives\/4000","title":{"rendered":"Exploring the Neural Network Implementation of Phonological Systems: Insights from Vowel Harmony and Disharmony"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We are pleased to announce that Ivy presented a talk titled “Phonetic substance is encoded in the neural network implementation of the phonological system: the case of vowel harmony and vowel disharmony” at the satellite workshop of the 23rd Old-World Conference in Phonology (OCP23).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study investigates the role of phonetic substance in phonological acquisition. We aim to disentangle pure phonological learning from the speech production and perception channel by employing text-based neural network simulations. Sequence-to-sequence models were trained to learn the underlying-surface mappings of vowel harmony and vowel disharmony. The results revealed significantly more productions with backness agreement errors in the disharmony condition compared to the harmony condition, confirming a learning bias favoring vowel harmony. We attributed the difference to how the phonetic basis underlying vowel harmony can be reflected as adjacency in featural representations, thereby inducing a simpler computational structure. Our findings thus call for a reconsideration of the distinction between structural and substantive biases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please check more details here: https:\/\/www.phonetics.mmll.cam.ac.uk\/ocp23\/representation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We are pleased to announce that Ivy presented a talk titled “Phonetic substance is encoded in the neural network implementation of the phonological system: the case of vowel harmony and vowel disharmony” at the satellite workshop of the 23rd Old-World Conference in Phonology (OCP23). The study investigates the role of phonetic substance in phonological acquisition. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[204],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4000"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4021,"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions\/4021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linguistics.hku.hk\/ldlhku\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}