Speech errors reflect newly learned phonotactic constraints.
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.
Beckman InstituteUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. warker@cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu
Jill A
JA
Warker
Gary S
GS
Dell
D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D013997:Time Factors; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*