Behavioral and Neurodynamic Effects of Word Learning on Phonotactic Repair

Abstract

Processes governing the creation, perception and production of spoken words are sensitive to the patterns of speech sounds in the language user’s lexicon. Generative linguistic theory suggests that listeners infer constraints on possible sound patterning from the lexicon and apply these constraints to all aspects of word use. In contrast, emergentist accounts suggest that these phonotactic constraints are a product of interactive associative mapping with items in the lexicon. To determine the degree to which phonotactic constraints are lexically mediated, we observed the effects of learning new words that violate English phonotactic constraints (e.g., srigin) on phonotactic perceptual repair processes in nonword consonant-consonant-vowel (CCV) stimuli (e.g., /sre/). Subjects who learned such words were less likely to “repair” illegal onset clusters (/sr/) and report them as legal ones (/∫r/). Effective connectivity analyses of MRI-constrained reconstructions of simultaneously collected magnetoencephalography (MEG) and EEG data showed that these behavioral shifts were accompanied by changes in the strength of influences of lexical areas on acoustic-phonetic areas. These results strengthen the interpretation of previous results suggesting that phonotactic constraints on perception are produced by top-down lexical influences on speech processing.

Exploring How Phonotactic Knowledge Can Be Represented in Cognitive Networks

“…As in Simulation 1, we sought in the present simulation to examine the ideas of [19,20,31] that phonotactic knowledge can emerge from lexical representations. We again examined if the sum of the other activated words in the network would capture how words are processed if sublexical representations were used.…”

“…Based on the ideas of [19,20], see also [31], that phonotactic knowledge can emerge from lexical representations, we examined if a cognitive network that contained only words might be able to exhibit knowledge of phonotactic information. Previous attempts to account for the representation of phonotactic information have typically appealed to the explicit representation of words (i.e., lexical representations) and phonemes and biphones (i.e., sub-lexical representations).…”

Word Forms Reflect Trade‐Offs Between Speaker Effort and Robust Listener Recognition

“…Second, the correct choice of subword unit in a hierarchical model is unclear (i.e., morphemes or syllables), and in either case only a subset of languages have large‐scale resources to characterize these sub‐word segments (e.g., CELEX; Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995), which would limit the number of languages in our sample (see also Mahowald et al., 2018, who offer a similar justification). Finally, neuroimaging work suggests that phonotactic constraints may emerge from lexical regularities without strong constraints on intermediate representations of sound patterns (Gow, Schoenhaut, Avcu, & Ahlfors, 2021; Gow, Segawa, Ahlfors, & Lin, 2008). We return to these issues in more detail in the Discussion, particularly in limitations in modeling the recognition of nonwords.…”

Neural representation of phonological wordform in bilateral posterior temporal cortex

“…The phonological patterning of wordforms is confounded with the patterning of the phonemes that make up words, making it difficult to discriminate between lexical and segmental representation. This problem is compounded by evidence for the influence of lexical factors on phoneme processing and representation in the brain (Gow et al, 2021;Gow et al, 2008;Gwilliams et al, 2022;Leonard et al, 2016;Myers, 2007). Moreover, auditory words may evoke activation of semantic, articulatory, syntactic, and episodic representations in addition to stored representations of phonological wordform.…”