Allophonic and Phonemic Contrasts in Infants' Learning of Sound Patterns

Seidl, Amanda; Cristià, Alejandrina; Bernard, Amélie; Onishi, Kristine H.

doi:10.1080/15475440902754326

Cited by 59 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Previous phonotactic learning experiments (e.g., Chambers, Onishi, & Fisher, 2003, 2010, 2011; Dell, Reed, Adams, & Meyer, 2000; Goldrick & Larson, 2008; Onishi, Chambers, & Fisher, 2002; Seidl, Cristià, Bernard, & Onishi, 2009; Warker, 2013; Warker & Dell, 2006) have described phonotactic patterns at the level of the syllable, but they did not directly test whether representations were at the syllable or word level (since most have used one-syllable, consonant-vowel-consonant or CVC items). The current experiments seek evidence that phonotactic knowledge can be represented at the level of the syllable (or syllable-sized unit), independent of the word, by examining whether syllable-level patterns generalize across word position and word structure, thus asking whether an onset is an onset and a coda is a coda regardless of word structure and position.…”

Section: (3) Evidence Suggesting the Word As A Possible Unit Of Reprementioning

confidence: 99%

An onset is an onset: Evidence from abstraction of newly-learned phonotactic constraints

Bernard

2015

Journal of Memory and Language

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Phonotactic constraints are language-specific patterns in the sequencing of speech sounds. Are these constraints represented at the syllable level (ng cannot begin syllables in English) or at the word level (ng cannot begin words)? In a continuous recognition-memory task, participants more often falsely recognized novel test items that followed than violated the training constraints, whether training and test items matched in word structure (one or two syllables) or position of restricted consonants (word-edge or word-medial position). E.g., learning that ps are onsets and fs codas, participants generalized from pef (one syllable) to putvif (two syllables), and from putvif (word-edge positions) to bufpak (word-medial positions). These results suggest that newly-learned phonotactic constraints are represented at the syllable level. The syllable is a representational unit available and spontaneously used when learning speech-sound constraints. In the current experiments, an onset is an onset and a coda a coda, regardless of word structure or word position.

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Section: (3) Evidence Suggesting the Word As A Possible Unit Of Reprementioning

confidence: 99%

An onset is an onset: Evidence from abstraction of newly-learned phonotactic constraints

Bernard

2015

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…Since there is suggestive evidence that children are sensitive to syllable-position and possibly co-occurrence information in their native language (e.g., Coady & Aslin, 2004), and since infants are able to track both positional information (e.g., preferring words that start with F after being familiarized with F-onset restrictions; Chambers et al, 2003, 2011; Seidl, Cristià, Bernard, & Onishi, 2009) and co-occurrences between larger units (e.g., segmenting words out of a continuous stream based on transitional probabilities between syllables; e.g., Aslin et al, 1998; Saffran et al, 1996; Saffran, Johnson, Aslin, & Newport, 1999; Saffran & Wilson, 2003), it may also be possible for children and young infants to track both syllable-position and local co-occurrence information simultaneously.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Novel phonotactic learning: Tracking syllable-position and co-occurrence constraints

Bernard

2017

Journal of Memory and Language

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Are syllable-level and co-occurrence representations simultaneously available when one learns novel phonotactics? After training on word-medial consonant restrictions (e.g., word-medial onsets P/Z, codas D/F, and cross-syllable consonant clusters FP/DZ in items like baF.Pev, tiD.Zek), adults falsely recognized novel items containing restricted consonants with the same co-occurrences (e.g., FP) more often than those with different co-occurrences (e.g., FZ) when syllable-position information was kept constant (e.g., vuF.Pet vs. vuF.Zet; Experiment 1). Thus, adults tracked co-occurrence information. Additionally, even when co-occurrence information was different from training, participants more often falsely recognized novel items that contained restricted consonants in the same (e.g., onset-Z) rather than different syllable positions (e.g., coda-Z), whether the restricted consonants were in the same (word-medial, e.g., vuF.Zet vs. vuZ.Fet, Experiment 2) or different word positions (word-edge, e.g., Zut.veF vs. Fut.veZ, Experiment 3). Thus, adults also tracked syllable-level information. These findings show that adults spontaneously represent sound sequences at multiple levels.

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“…E. Chambers, Onishi, & Fisher, 2011;Cristia & Seidl, 2008;Gerken & Knight, 2015;Gerken & Quam, in press;Seidl & Buckley, 2005;Seidl et al, 2009;Seidl, Onishi, & Cristia, 2014;Wang & Seidl, 2015), 2 articles in proceedings (Cristia & Peperkamp, 2012;Cristia, Seidl, & Gerken, 2011), 2 theses (Cristia, 2006;K. E. Chambers, 2004), 1 chapter in a collection (Cristia, Seidl, & Francis, 2011), 2 sets of data that have not been published (one reported on in Cristia, 2015).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• Age: younger infants may be less able to encode phonotactics, resulting in familiarity (rather than novelty preferences) (Seidl et al, 2009), or complete failure for complex rules (K. E. Chambers et al, 2011);…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, it can help us measure the effects of changes in the design across different implementations of the same general conceptual goal, or test the reliable effect of a factor that has been invoked on theoretical or empirical grounds. For instance, infant age is often invoked to explain changes in performance, as older infants may be more entrenched in their native language and more resistant to the exposure (Yoshida et al, 2010), and younger infants, although more flexible, may be cognitively limited and learn more slowly (Seidl, Cristia, Onishi, & Bernard, 2009). These differences often occur within the same study, but sometimes are invoked to explain differences across data sets published in different papers.…”

Section: Why Carry Out a Meta-analysis?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Can infants learn phonology in the lab? A meta-analytic answer

Cristià¹

2016

Preprint

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Two of the key tasks facing the language-learning infant lie at the level of phonology: establishing which sounds are contrastive in the native inventory, and determining what their possible syllabic positions and permissible combinations (phonotactics) are. In 2002-2003, two theoretical proposals, one bearing on how infants can learn sounds (Maye, Werker, & Gerken, 2002) and the other on phonotactics (K. E. Chambers, Onishi, & Fisher, 2003), were put forward on the pages of Cognition, each supported by two laboratory experiments, wherein a group of infants was briefly exposed to a set of pseudo-words, and plausible phonological generalizations were tested in a subsequent phase. These two papers have received considerable attention from the general scientific community, and inspired a flurry of follow-up work. In the context of questions regarding the replicability of psychological science, the present work uses a meta-analytic approach to appraise extant empirical evidence for infant phonological learning in the laboratory. It is found that neither seminal finding (on learning sounds and learning phonotactics) holds up when close methodological replications are integrated, although less close methodological replications do provide some evidence in favor of the sound learning strand of work. Implications for authors and readers of this literature are drawn out. It would be desirable that additional mechanisms for phonological learning be explored, and that future infant laboratory work should employ paradigms that rely on constrained and unambiguous links between experimental exposure and measured infant behavior.

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Allophonic and Phonemic Contrasts in Infants' Learning of Sound Patterns

Cited by 59 publications

References 40 publications

An onset is an onset: Evidence from abstraction of newly-learned phonotactic constraints

An onset is an onset: Evidence from abstraction of newly-learned phonotactic constraints

Novel phonotactic learning: Tracking syllable-position and co-occurrence constraints

Can infants learn phonology in the lab? A meta-analytic answer

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