A Special Role of Syllables, But Not Vowels or Consonants, for Nonadjacent Dependency Learning

Abstract

Successful language processing entails tracking (morpho)syntactic relationships between distant units of speech, so-called nonadjacent dependencies (NADs). Many cues to such dependency relations have been identified, yet the linguistic elements encoding them have received little attention. In the present investigation, we tested whether and how these elements, here syllables, consonants, and vowels, affect behavioral learning success as well as learning-related changes in neural activity in relation to item-specific NAD learning. In a set of two EEG studies with adults, we compared learning under conditions where either all segment types (Experiment 1) or only one segment type (Experiment 2) was informative. The collected behavioral and ERP data indicate that, when all three segment types are available, participants mainly rely on the syllable for NAD learning. With only one segment type available for learning, adults also perform most successfully with syllable-based dependencies. Although we find no evidence for successful learning across vowels in Experiment 2, dependencies between consonants seem to be identified at least passively at the phonetic-feature level. Together, these results suggest that successful item-specific NAD learning may depend on the availability of syllabic information. Furthermore, they highlight consonants' distinctive power to support lexical processes. Although syllables show a clear facilitatory function for NAD learning, the underlying mechanisms of this advantage require further research.

Constraints on infants’ ability to extract non-adjacent dependencies from vowels and consonants

“…A potential reason for this challenge may be that by the age of 8–10 months (or earlier), infants have learned to group individual sounds into syllabic units. Similar to adults, who display a clear advantage for syllable-based NAD learning ( Weyers and Mueller, 2022 ), infants at this age may perceive syllables as more salient than individual phonemes. The fact that there was a pause inserted between syllables in the present experiment might have supported syllable instead of phoneme perception.…”

“…Interestingly, the same paradigm with adults yielded (besides a strong syllable advantage for NAD learning) an electrophysiological (but no behavioral) indication of learning based on consonants, but not vowels ( Weyers and Mueller, 2022 ), even though an advantage for vowels in structural processes has been argued to be present in adults as well (e.g., Bonatti et al, 2005 ). One reason could be that adults already have extensive experience with possible words and grammatical relations in their native (and non-native) language(s).…”

“…The stimulus material consisted of trisyllabic sequences of consonant-vowel syllables (CV), individually recorded and spoken by a trained female speaker (see Experiment 2; Weyers & Mueller, 2022 ). Syllable recordings of similar pitch were selected, digitized (44.1 kHz/16-bit sampling rate, mono), cut to the same length (380 ms) and normalized to the same sound intensity.…”

“… Newport and Aslin (2004) aimed to examine consonant and vowel-based NAD learning, but admit that the fixed segmental frames ( p x g x t x and x a x u x e ) they used for their stimuli rather constituted adjacent than non-adjacent dependencies at the segmental level. A first study on NAD learning in adults that directly compared syllables, consonants and vowels as NAD-encoding units showed a clear advantage of the syllable and a tentative advantage of consonants over vowels ( Weyers and Mueller, 2022 ).…”

The Impact and Effectiveness of the Syllablebased Reading Approach on Moroccan Pupils’ Reading Competency

“…The results showed that a substantial increase in spelling achievement for both the closed syllable spelling test and the silent syllable spelling test. Other studies with positives views towards the syllabary method include [16,17,18,19,20,21,22] Latifa Belfakir, Ph.D., has been working as a university professor for 19 years. Her major fields of interests, as a researcher, are technology and language teaching and Leadership studies.…”