Does Grammar Constrain Statistical Learning?

Abstract

Bonatti et al. reported 16 vowels for French; Lexique 3 uses 15, as the difference between closed and open /a/ is disappearing (Peereman & Dufour, 2003).

The quest for generalizations over consonants: Asymmetries between consonants and vowels are not the by-product of acoustic differences

“…As mentioned in the introduction, some authors attributed processing differences between vowels and consonants to differences in the respective distributions of these phonetic categories (e.g., Keidel et al, 2007). We believe that such an account is unlikely to explain our results.…”

“…For example, the participants' experience with the distributional properties of their native language may lead to an advantage for consonants in lexical processing (e.g., Keidel et al, 2007; but see Bonatti et al, 2007). Likewise, the advantage for vowels in the structural generalizations observed by Toro et al (2008) may be due to systematic acoustic differences between vowels and consonants.…”

“…Still, there is no evidence that the direction of causation is the one proposed by Keidel et al (2007) and not the opposite one. After all, one has to explain where the distributional differences come from; if they are due to the processing biases proposed in the aforementioned experiments, one has a principled explanation for both the experimental and the distributional results.…”

“…For example, Keidel, Jenison, Kluender, and Seidenberg (2007) claimed that differences in the distribution of consonants and vowels in French (the native language of the participants in Bonatti et al, 2005, andMehler et al, 2006) may explain the above-mentioned results. They showed through corpus analyses that, at least in French, consonant sequences are better predictors of lexical identity than are vowels.…”

“…More generally, distributional accounts (such as the one proposed by Keidel et al, 2007) do not seem to offer a principled explanation for the processing asymmetries between consonants and vowels (see also Bonatti et al, 2007). In fact, such accounts implicitly assume most of Bonatti et al's (2005) proposal: They have to assume that sonants, vowels are much favored, even under extreme conditions.…”