Listeners learn phonotactic patterns conditioned on suprasegmental cues

Novel phonotactic learning by children and infants: Generalizing syllable-position but not co-occurrence regularities

Restrictions in the sequencing of sounds (phonotactic constraints) can be represented at the level of sound co-occurrences (e.g., in baF.Pev, F and P co-occur) and at the level of the syllable (e.g., F is syllable-coda/end, P is syllable-onset/start). Can children (5-year-olds) and infants (11-month-olds) represent constraints as sound co-occurrences and/or relative to syllable positions? Participants listened to artificial languages displaying both word-medial consonant restrictions in co-occurrence pairs (e.g., FP or DZ but not FZ) and in the position of consonants within syllables (e.g., P/Z onsets and D/F codas) in words like baF.Pev and tiD.Zek. Children responded similarly to novel words with the same (e.g., FP) versus different (e.g., FZ) co-occurrence pairs, but they were more misled (i.e., responded "heard it before") by novel words with consonants in the same (e.g., onset-P) versus different (e.g., coda-P) syllable positions (Experiment 1). With the same training stimuli, infants had similar orientation times for novel words with the same versus different co-occurrence pairs, but they had longer orientation times for novel words with consonants in the same versus different syllable positions (Experiment 2). Thus, across different methods and ages, syllable-position information was more readily available for generalization than consonant co-occurrence information. The results suggest that when multiple regularities are present simultaneously, some phonotactic constraints (e.g., consonants in particular syllable positions) may be spontaneously represented and generalized by children and infants, whereas others (e.g., consonant co-occurrences) might not be available. The results contribute toward understanding how children and infants represent sound sequences.

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.