This course will consider very simple phonological  phenomena in the context of ‘big picture’ issues in linguistics and cognitive science,  such as 

• how to understand neutralization patterns in terms of formal logic
• the Subset Principle in phonology
• epistemic boundedness in phonology 
• the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus in phonology
• the initial state and the learning path in phonology
• empiricism and rationalism with respect to features and syllable structure—what can a child  learn from experience and what must be built-in?

Reading suggestions

I. Appelbaum. The lack of invariance problem and the goal of speech perception. In The 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, pages 1541–1544, 1996.

M. Hale and C. Reiss. The subset principle in phonology: Why the tabula can’t be rasa. Journal of Linguistics, 39:219–244, 2003.

M. Halle. Knowledge unlearned and untaught: What speakers know about the sounds of their language. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, and G. Miller, editors, Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality, pages 294– 303. MIT Press, 1978.

R. Hammarberg. The metaphysics of coarticulation. Journal of Phonetics, 4:353–363, 1976.

R. Hammarberg. The cooked and the raw. Journal of Information Science, 3(6):261–267, 1981.

C. Reiss. Research methods in armchair linguistics. In G. Dupre, R. Nefdt, and K. Stanton, editors, Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Linguistics. Oxford University Press, In press. https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007568

E. Sapir. The psychological reality of phonemes. In D. Mandelbaum, editor, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, pages 46–60. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1949.