Speech errors reflect newly learned phonotactic constraints.

Abstract

Speech errors reveal the speaker's implicit knowledge of phonotactic constraints, both languagewide constraints (e.g., /K/ cannot be a syllable onset when one is speaking English) and experimentally induced constraints (e.g., /k/ cannot be an onset during the experiment). Four experiments investigated the acquisition of novel 2nd-order constraints, in which the allowable position of a consonant depends on some other property of the syllable (e.g., /k/ can only be an onset if the vowel is /I/). Participants recited strings of syllables that exhibited the novel constraints throughout a 4-day experiment. Their errors reflected the newly learned constraints but not until the 2nd day of training. This contrasts with previous research showing that errors become sensitive to 1st-order constraints almost immediately. A model that learns to assign phonemes to syllable positions is presented. It attributes the relative slowness of the acquisition of 2nd-order constraints to the self-interfering property of these constraints.

Rapid generalization in phonotactic learning

“…In these experiments, participants are presented with individual words in a miniature artificial language, and are then tested on novel words to determine what knowledge they have extracted from the language. Adult participants have shown evidence of learning the phonotactics of artificial languages in such diverse tasks as acceptability judgments (Richtsmeier, 2011), speech error patterns in production (Gaskell et al, 2014;Warker & Dell, 2006) and familiarity judgments (Cristia et al, 2013). Related findings have been reported in artificial language studies of morphological alternations (Finley & Badecker, 2009;Peperkamp et al, 2006;Wilson, 2003).…”

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

“…For example, in language production, the frequencies with which verbs appear in alternative syntactic contexts has consequences for sentence production choices of sentences containing those verbs (Arnold, Wasow, Asudeh & Alrenga, 2004;Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2010;Stallings et al, 1998) as do the distributional pairings between noun animacy and sentence structure (Bresnan & Ford, 2010;Reali & Christiansen, 2007;Gennari & MacDonald, 2009). Like comprehenders, language producers implicitly learn statistical patterns of their linguistic environment, and this information affects production choices and accuracy (Boyd & Goldberg, 2011;Chang, 2009;Dell, Reed, Adams & Meyer, 2000;Warker & Dell, 2006). Language users also have learned the statistics of their visual environment, with consequences for codability in picture description tasks, where, for example, recognition of a ball is influenced by recognition of a throwing action and vice versa (Almor et al, 2009;Handy et al, 2003;Knoeferle & Crocker, 2006;Palmer, 1975).…”

The effect of anomalous utterances on language production

“…For example, experience affects speakers' knowledge of where speech sounds can appear in syllables (Dell, Reed, Adams, & Meyer, 2000;Warker & Dell, 2006). Experiencing novel isolated words causes speakers to represent those words in their lexicon, as shown by the fact that such words can induce a shift in perceptual boundaries (Leach & Samuel, 2007), cause cohort competition (Gaskell & Dumay, 2003) or, after only a short training period, give rise to cumulative semantic interference (Oppenheim, 2015).…”