Listeners' knowledge of phonological universals: evidence from nasal clusters

Abstract

Optimality Theory explains typological markedness implications by proposing that all speakers possess universal constraints penalizing marked structure, irrespective of the evidence provided by their language (Prince & Smolensky, 1993). An account of phonological perception sketched here entails that markedness constraints reveal their presence by inducing perceptual 'repairs' to structures ungrammatical in the hearer's language. As onset clusters of falling sonority are typologically marked relative to those of rising sonority (Greenberg, 1978), we examine English speakers' perception of nasal-initial clusters-lacking in English. We find greater accuracy for rising-sonority clusters, evidencing knowledge of markedness constraints favoring such onset clusters. The misperception of sonority falls cannot be accounted for by stimulus artifacts (the materials are perceived accurately by speakers of Russian-a language allowing nasal-initial clusters) nor by phonetic failure (English speakers misperceive falls even with printed materials) nor by putative relations of such onsets to the statistics of the English lexicon.

Amodal Aspects of Linguistic Design

“…Our findings that sonority peaks define syllables in ASL converge with past experimental and linguistic results from spoken language [7,8,[16][17][18][19][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] and the linguistic evidence from sign languages [14,15,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] to suggest that sonority constrains the structure of the syllable across modalities. Why do different languages converge on this restriction?…”

“…For example, linguistic analysis [7,8] suggests that syllables like bnif are preferred to lbif, as their sonority profile is better formed. Remarkably, similar preferences have been documented experimentally among speakers of various languages (English [34,[36][37][38][39]43,44], Spanish [40] and Korean [35]) despite no experience with either type of syllable. Such observations suggest that people encode broad phonological restrictions on the syllable structure of spoken language.…”

“…Furthermore, there is evidence that people are sensitive to broad sonority restrictions, and they extend this knowledge even to syllable types that are unattested in their language [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. For example, linguistic analysis [7,8] suggests that syllables like bnif are preferred to lbif, as their sonority profile is better formed.…”

Language Universals Engage Broca's Area

“…In line with this possibility, linguistic evidence has shown that this hierarchy correlates with syllable frequency across languages [9] and similar preferences are also seen experimentally in the behavior of individual speakers: as sonority distance decreases, participants tend to misidentify the syllable (e.g., misidentify lbif as the disyllabic lebif [9,[11][12][13][14]. These misidentifications are documented irrespective of whether the syllables are present [15] or absent in participants' language [9,[11][12][13][14], and even when auditory pressures are minimized (e.g., by using printed materials [11,12]).…”

“…These misidentifications are documented irrespective of whether the syllables are present [15] or absent in participants' language [9,[11][12][13][14], and even when auditory pressures are minimized (e.g., by using printed materials [11,12]). These results imply an abstract grammatical process that repairs ill-formed syllables as better formed ones (e.g., lbifRlebif)-the worse formed the syllable, the more likely its repair, hence its misidentification.…”