Possible phonological cues in categorial acquisition

Abstract

This paper reports an experiment in which adult native speakers of Dutch were asked to categorize nonce stems. These were presented without any morphological or other information about their potential class-membership. We expected that subjects would be able to categorize these words solely on the basis of phonological information. Nouns in Dutch have a richer possible syllablestructure than verbs (Trommelen 1989) and therefore, we expected that stimuli with a 'nominal' syllable make-up could be identified by the subjects as nouns where the other stimuli were ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The results show that this is indeed the case, adding to the evidence that native speakers of a language are able to use phonological information to categorize the words of their language. IntroductionIn this paper we report an experiment on the abilities of native Dutch speakers to determine the category of nonce words solely on the basis of phonological information. Research in the domain of language acquisition has proven that both the semantic and syntactic properties of words play an important role in the acquisition of word categories. In these studies it is proposed that certain correlations exist between syntactic properties of a word and its semantic properties, and it is demonstrated that children make use of these correlations in order to arrive at the correct meaning of a word, or to acquire certain syntactic properties (such as argument structure, category).In a famous study on language learnability, Pinker (1987) elaborates on a 'bootstrapping' mechanism of this type, claiming that children use the semantic properties of a word as a bootstrap to the syntactic structure. A bootstrapping mechanism such as Pinker's would enable the child to infer the syntactic category of a word from a rough semantic categorization like 'thing' , 'causal agent' , and 'true in the past' . Although this proposal has received a lot of criticism over the years, the basic idea that the semantic

Looking beyond literacy and phonology: word learning and phonological cue use in children with and without dyslexia

“…Similarly, in Dutch-the language under investigation in the current study-phonological cues have been found to distinguish between nouns and verbs: native adult speakers of Dutch were able to use phonological information to categorize nonword stems as nouns or verbs (Don and Erkelens, 2008). For instance, a bisyllabic target with final syllable containing schwa ("fallem") was likely to be categorized as a noun, whereas a monosyllabic target with a superheavy syllable ("pluig") was more likely to be categorized as a verb.…”

“…It should be noted, however, that the effect size for this main effect was small (while other effect sizes were close to zero) and the current sample size provided limited power to detect such an effect as significant. Given earlier results for Dutch (Don and Erkelens, 2008), perhaps such cues are only used for initial categorization and easily overridden. In Dutch, morphological or syntactic cues might be more useful than phonological cues for word categorization (Erkelens, 2009).…”

“…Targets and foils were all phonotactically legal and contained no consonant clusters. Noun-like and verb-like items were constructed based on classification studies by Don and Erkelens (2008), as discussed in the Introduction. Dutch speaking adults had a clear preference to treat bisyllabic stems as nouns (e.g., "a bodee" /bo:de:/) and monosyllabic stems as verbs (e.g., "I voek" /vu:k/), in line with the distribution of phonological cues in Dutch.…”

“…Previous research has found that phonological cues affect children's categorization of words (e.g., Fitneva et al, 2009). Such cues also seem to be available in Dutch (Don and Erkelens, 2008). However, so far, only one study has addressed the possible role of phonological cues to word class in children with a risk of reading problems.…”

Data_Sheet_1.docx

“…Similarly, in Dutch-the language under investigation in the current study-phonological cues have been found to distinguish between nouns and verbs: native adult speakers of Dutch were able to use phonological information to categorize nonword stems as nouns or verbs (Don and Erkelens, 2008). For instance, a bisyllabic target with final syllable containing schwa ("fallem") was likely to be categorized as a noun, whereas a monosyllabic target with a superheavy syllable ("pluig") was more likely to be categorized as a verb.…”