Phonological alternations often serve to modify forms so that they respect a phonotacticrestriction that applies across the words of language. Although it has long been assumed thatan adequate theory of phonology should capture the connection between phonotactics andalternations, there is no psycholinguistic evidence that speakers actually do use a singlemechanism for them both. In this study, we used an artificial language learning experimentwith adult subjects to test whether an alternation that meets a phonotactic target is easier tolearn than one that does not. The results suggest that phonotactic knowledge does aid in theacquisition of alternations, and also provide a novel example of the influence of the firstlanguage on second language learning.
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