New phonotactic constraints learned implicitly by producing syllable strings generalize to the production of new syllables

Short-term exposure alters adult listeners' perception of segmental phonotactics

This study evaluates the malleability of adults' perception of probabilistic phonotactic (biphone) probabilities, building on a body of literature on statistical phonotactic learning. It was first replicated that listeners categorize phonetic continua as sounds that create higher-probability sequences in their native language. Listeners were also exposed to skewed distributions of biphone contexts, which resulted in the enhancement or reversal of these effects. Thus, listeners dynamically update biphone probabilities (BPs) and bring this to bear on perception of ambiguous acoustic information. These effects can override long-term BP effects rooted in native language experience.

Verbal Working Memory, Long-Term Knowledge, and Statistical Learning

Evidence supporting the idea that serial-order verbal working memory is underpinned by long-term knowledge has accumulated over more than half a century. Recent studies using natural-language statistics, artificial statistical-learning techniques, and the Hebb repetition paradigm have revealed multiple types of long-term knowledge underlying serial-order verbal working memory performance. These include (a) element-to-element association knowledge, which slowly accumulates through extensive exposure to an exemplar; (b) position–element knowledge, which is acquired through several encounters with an exemplar; and (c) whole-sequence knowledge, which is captured by the Hebb repetition paradigm and acquired rapidly with a few repetitions. Arguably, the first two are a basis for fluent and efficient language usage, and the third is a basis for vocabulary learning. Thus, statistical-learning mechanisms (and possibly episodic-learning mechanisms) may form the foundation of language acquisition and language processing, which characterize linguistic long-term knowledge for verbal working memory.

Novel stress phonotactics are learnable by English speakers: Novel tone phonotactics are not

Speech errors are sensitive to newly learned phonotactic constraints. For example, if speakers produce strings of syllables in which /f/ is an onset if the vowel is /æ/, but a coda if the vowel is /I/, their slips will respect that constraint after a period of sleep. Constraints in which the contextual factor is nonlinguistic, however, do not appear to be learnable by this method—for example, /f/ is an onset if the speech rate is fast, but /f/ is a coda if the speech rate is slow. The present study demonstrated that adult English speakers can learn (after a sleep period) constraints based on stress (e.g., /f/ is an onset if the syllable is stressed, but /f/ is a coda if the syllable is unstressed), but cannot learn analogous constraints based on tone (e.g., /f/ is an onset if the tone is rising, but /f/ is a coda if the tone is falling). The results are consistent with the fact that, in English, stress is a relevant lexical phonological property (e.g., “INsight” and “inCITE” are different words), but tone is not (e.g., “yes!” and “yes?” are the same word, despite their different pragmatic functions). The results provide useful constraints on how consolidation effects in learning may interact with early learning experiences.

The role of consolidation in learning context-dependent phonotactic patterns in speech and digital sequence production

Speakers implicitly learn novel phonotactic patterns by producing strings of syllables. The learning is revealed in their speech errors. First-order patterns, such as "/f/ must be a syllable onset," can be distinguished from contingent, or second-order, patterns, such as "/f/ must be an onset if the vowel is /a/, but a coda if the vowel is /o/." A metaanalysis of 19 experiments clearly demonstrated that first-order patterns affect speech errors to a very great extent in a single experimental session, but second-order vowel-contingent patterns only affect errors on the second day of testing, suggesting the need for a consolidation period. Two experiments tested an analogue to these studies involving sequences of button pushes, with fingers as "consonants" and thumbs as "vowels." The button-push errors revealed two of the key speech-error findings: first-order patterns are learned quickly, but second-order thumb-contingent patterns are only strongly revealed in the errors on the second day of testing. The influence of computational complexity on the implicit learning of phonotactic patterns in speech production may be a general feature of sequence production.

Encoding of distributional regularities independent of markedness: Evidence from unimpaired speakers

Romani, Galuzzi, Guariglia, and Goslin (Comparing phoneme frequency, age of acquisition and loss in aphasia: Implications for phonological universals. Cognitive Neuropsychology) used speech error data from individuals with acquired impairments to argue that independent from articulatory complexity, within-language distributional regularities influence the processing of sound structure in speech production. Converging evidence from unimpaired speakers is reviewed, focusing on speech errors in language production. Future research should examine how articulatory and frequency factors are integrated in language processing.

Novel phonotactic learning: Tracking syllable-position and co-occurrence constraints

Are syllable-level and co-occurrence representations simultaneously available when one learns novel phonotactics? After training on word-medial consonant restrictions (e.g., word-medial onsets P/Z, codas D/F, and cross-syllable consonant clusters FP/DZ in items like baF.Pev, tiD.Zek), adults falsely recognized novel items containing restricted consonants with the same co-occurrences (e.g., FP) more often than those with different co-occurrences (e.g., FZ) when syllable-position information was kept constant (e.g., vuF.Pet vs. vuF.Zet; Experiment 1). Thus, adults tracked co-occurrence information. Additionally, even when co-occurrence information was different from training, participants more often falsely recognized novel items that contained restricted consonants in the same (e.g., onset-Z) rather than different syllable positions (e.g., coda-Z), whether the restricted consonants were in the same (word-medial, e.g., vuF.Zet vs. vuZ.Fet, Experiment 2) or different word positions (word-edge, e.g., Zut.veF vs. Fut.veZ, Experiment 3). Thus, adults also tracked syllable-level information. These findings show that adults spontaneously represent sound sequences at multiple levels.

The Frame Constraint on Experimentally Elicited Speech Errors in Japanese

The so-called syllable position effect in speech errors has been interpreted as reflecting constraints posed by the frame structure of a given language, which is separately operating from linguistic content during speech production. The effect refers to the phenomenon that when a speech error occurs, replaced and replacing sounds tend to be in the same position within a syllable or word. Most of the evidence for the effect comes from analyses of naturally occurring speech errors in Indo-European languages, and there are few studies examining the effect in experimentally elicited speech errors and in other languages. This study examined whether experimentally elicited sound errors in Japanese exhibits the syllable position effect. In Japanese, the sub-syllabic unit known as "mora" is considered to be a basic sound unit in production. Results showed that the syllable position effect occurred in mora errors, suggesting that the frame constrains the ordering of sounds during speech production.