Autosegmental representations (ARs; Goldsmith, 1976 ) are claimed to enable local analyses of otherwise non-local phenomena Odden ( 1994 ). Focusing on the domain of tone, we investigate this ability of ARs using a computationally well-defined notion of locality extended from Chandlee ( 2014 ). The result is a more nuanced understanding of the way in which ARs interact with phonological locality.

The Tier-based Strictly 2-Local (TSL 2 ) languages are a class of formal languages which have been shown to model long-distance phonotactic generalizations in natural language (Heinz et al., 2011). This paper introduces the Tier-based Strictly 2-Local Inference Algorithm (2TSLIA), the first nonenumerative learner for the TSL 2 languages. We prove the 2TSLIA is guaranteed to converge in polynomial time on a data sample whose size is bounded by a constant.