Universal Phonological Features

Abstract. The Theory of universal grammar suggests that human languages may share some similarities at the phonological level. Based on this hypothesis, we further propose a language generalization effect (LGE) and hypothesize that people may inherit the universal phonological features from their native languages and then transfer them to foreign languages. To test this hypothesis, in two experiments, participants listened to a pair of normal and syllable reversed recordings (Experiments 1a–1d) or normal and phonemic reversed recordings (Experiments 2a–2d) in unknown and native languages and reported their similarities. The results indicated that participants were more sensitive to the dissimilarities of normal recordings than to reversed ones. These results suggest that participants could identify the universal phonological features from normal recordings, but not reversed ones, and then adopt these features to better verify the dissimilarities of normal recordings. In sum, the current study first proposed the LGE and reported primary evidence to support it.