Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience

Onishi, Kristine H.; Chambers, Kyle E.; Fisher, Cynthia

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(01)00165-2

Cited by 161 publications

(183 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Phonotactic patterns can also be acquired in the lab: Participants familiarized with stimuli conforming to a particular pattern come to distinguish in performance between novel pattern-conforming and pattern-nonconforming stimuli. Such effects have been observed in learners as young as four months (Chambers et al, 2003;Saffran and Thiessen, 2003;Seidl and Buckley, 2005;Cristià et al, 2011), and in paradigms as diverse as phoneme restoration (Ohala and Feder, 1994), explicit categorization (Pycha et al, 2003;Wilson, 2003;Endress et al, 2005), allomorph selection (Peperkamp et al, 2006), speeded repetition (Onishi et al, 2002), induced speech errors (Dell et al, 2000;Goldrick, 2004;Warker and Dell, 2006), language-game responses (Wilson, 2006), and immediate recall (Majerus et al, 2004). These experiments are essentially conceptformation tasks in which participants learn to categorize stimuli, explicitly or implicitly, according to whether they conform to the target phonotactic pattern.…”

Section: Phonotactic Learning As Concept Learningmentioning

confidence: 98%

Inter- and intra-dimensional dependencies in implicit phonotactic learning

Moreton

2012

Journal of Memory and Language

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Is phonological learning subject to the same inductive biases as learning in other domains? Previous studies of non-linguistic learning found that intradimensional dependencies (between two instances of the same feature) were learned more easily than inter-dimensional ones. This study compares implicit learning of intra-and inter-dimensional phonotactic dependencies. A series of six unsupervised implicit-learning experiments shows that a pattern based on agreement between two instances of the same feature is easier to learn than one based on correlation between instances of two different features. The results are interpreted as evidence for domain-general restrictions on the form of domainspecific learning primitives.

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Section: Phonotactic Learning As Concept Learningmentioning

confidence: 98%

Inter- and intra-dimensional dependencies in implicit phonotactic learning

Moreton

2012

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…Results such as those in Onishi et al 2003, which demonstrate participants' ability to generalize over arbitrary patterns while encountering a small amount of data under brief exposure, may fall into the category of such cases. When miniature artificial languages have a structure in which there are very few competing hypotheses to have, and very little potentially ambiguous data, covering it with a single arbitrary generalization may suffice.…”

Section: 4mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Surfeit of the Stimulus: Analytic Biases Filter Lexical Statistics in Turkish Laryngeal Alternations

Becker¹,

Ketrez²,

Nevins³

2011

lan

120

153

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In an experimental task with novel words, we find that some lexical statistical regularities of Turkish phonotactics are productively extended in nonce words, while others are not. In particular, while laryngeal alternation rates in the lexicon can be predicted by the place of articulation of the stem-final stop, by word-length, and by the preceding vowel quality, this laryngeal alternation is only productively conditioned by place of articulation and word-length. Speakers' responses in a novel word task demonstrate that although they are attuned to the place of articulation and size effects, they ignore preceding vowels, even though the lexicon contains this information in abundance. We interpret this finding as evidence that speakers distinguish between phonologically motivated generalizations and accidental generalizations. We propose that universal grammar (UG), a set of analytic biases, acts as a filter on the generalizations that humans can make: UG contains information about possible and impossible interactions between phonological elements. Omnivorous statistical models that do not have information about possible interactions incorrectly reproduce accidental generalizations, thus failing to model speakers' behavior.*

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“…Onishi et al (2002) examined the learning of constraints which confined consonants to either word-initial or word-final position (e.g., /baep/, not */paeb/), and constraints which linked specific consonant-vowel sequences (e.g., /baep/ or /pɪb/, but not */paeb/ or */bɪp/). Adult participants were faster at repeating novel test words which obeyed the experimentinduced constraints than test words which violated those constraints.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning novel phonotactics from exposure to continuous speech

Adriaans

Kager

2017

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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Knowledge of phonotactics is commonly assumed to derive from the lexicon. However, computational studies have suggested that phonotactic constraints might arise before the lexicon is in place, in particular from co-occurrences in continuous speech. The current study presents two artificial language learning experiments aimed at testing whether phonotactic learning can take place in the absence of words. Dutch participants were presented with novel consonant constraints embedded in continuous artificial languages. Vowels occurred at random, which resulted in an absence of recurring word forms in the speech stream. In Experiment 1 participants with different training languages showed significantly different preferences on a set of novel test items. However, only one of the two languages resulted in preferences that were above chancelevel performance. In Experiment 2 participants were exposed to a control language without novel statistical cues. Participants did not develop a preference for either phonotactic structure in the test items. An analysis of Dutch phonotactics indicated that the failure to induce novel phonotactics in one condition might have been due to interference from the native language. Our findings suggest that novel phonotactics can be learned from continuous speech, but participants have difficulty learning novel patterns that go against the native language.

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Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience

Cited by 161 publications

References 34 publications

Inter- and intra-dimensional dependencies in implicit phonotactic learning

Inter- and intra-dimensional dependencies in implicit phonotactic learning

The Surfeit of the Stimulus: Analytic Biases Filter Lexical Statistics in Turkish Laryngeal Alternations

Learning novel phonotactics from exposure to continuous speech

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