Phonetic richness can outweigh prosodically-driven phonological knowledge when learning words in an artificial language

Abstract

a b s t r a c tHow do Dutch and Korean listeners use acoustic-phonetic information when learning words in an artificial language? Dutch has a voiceless 'unaspirated' stop, produced with shortened Voice Onset Time (VOT) in prosodic strengthening environments (e.g., in domain-initial position and under prominence), enhancing the feature { À spread glottis}; Korean has a voiceless 'aspirated' stop produced with lengthened VOT in similar environments, enhancing the feature {þ spread glottis}. Given this crosslinguistic difference, two competing hypotheses were tested. The phonological-superiority hypothesis predicts that Dutch and Korean listeners should utilize shortened and lengthened VOTs, respectively, as cues in artificial-language segmentation. The phonetic-superiority hypothesis predicts that both groups should take advantage of the phonetic richness of longer VOTs (i.e., their enhanced auditory-perceptual robustness). Dutch and Korean listeners learned the words of an artificial language better when wordinitial stops had longer VOTs than when they had shorter VOTs. It appears that language-specific phonological knowledge can be overridden by phonetic richness in processing an unfamiliar language. Listeners nonetheless performed better when the stimuli were based on the speech of their native languages, suggesting that the use of richer phonetic information was modulated by listeners' familiarity with the stimuli.

Transition Probabilities and Different Levels of Prominence in Segmentation

“…It might be suggested that this happens because pitch marks the edges of the structural units of speech cross-linguistically, while the perception of durational cues is driven by the native phonology of the participants. When adults attend to an unfamiliar language, universal phonetically rich cues can override phonological knowledge specific to their native language (see, e.g., Kim, Cho, & McQueen, 2012).…”

Prosodic Boundary Strengthening in the Phonetics–Prosody Interface

“…The results revealed that the presence of DIS in the onset of the post-boundary word (e.g., company), even in the absence of preboundary lengthening of the preceding word (e.g., mill) serves as a cue to lexical segmentation via resolving lexical ambiguity that arises temporally at the juncture (milk is a competitor of mill in the mill#company sequence). This result implies that the fine-grained phonetic detail of DIS even in the absence of other prosodic cues to the boundary is exploited by listeners in speech comprehension, warranting further studies that explore roles of DIS in various other aspects of speech comprehension across languages (e.g., Kim, Cho, and McQueen 2012).…”

Lexical Segmentation in Artificial Word Learning: The Effects of Converging Sublexical Cues

“…The characterisation of this segmentation process thus involves determining the role of sublexical cues and the progressive involvement of lexical information. At least four types of sublexical cues have been investigated in word learning experiments that include statistical information, phonotactic regularities (Finn & Hudson Kam, 2008), fine-grained acoustic-phonetic regularities (Fernandes, Ventura, & Kolinsky, 2007; Kim, Cho, & McQueen, 2012) and prosodic regularities, particularly rhythmic regularities (e.g., Saffran, Newport, & Aslin, 1996).…”