title: Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience.
abstract: Three experiments asked whether phonotactic regularities not present in English could be acquired by adult English speakers from brief listening experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables displaying restrictions on consonant position. Responses in a later speeded repetition task revealed rapid learning of (a) first-order regularities in which consonants were restricted to particular positions (e.g. [baep] not *[paeb]), and (b) second-order regularities in which consonant position depended on the adjacent vowel (e.g. [baep] or [pIb], not *[paeb] or *[bIp]). No evidence of learning was found for second-order regularities in which consonant position depended on speaker's voice. These results demonstrated that phonotactic constraints are rapidly learned from listening experience and that some types of contingencies (consonant-vowel) are more easily learned than others (consonant-voice).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. konishi@s.psych.uiuc.edu
authors.forename: Kristine H
authors.initials: KH
authors.lastname: Onishi
authors.forename: Kyle E
authors.initials: KE
authors.lastname: Chambers
authors.forename: Cynthia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fisher
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning