Listeners learn phonotactic patterns conditioned on suprasegmental cues

ABSTRACT

Language learners are sensitive to phonotactic patterns from an early age, and can acquire both simple and 2nd-order positional restrictions contingent on segment identity (e.g., /f/ is an onset with /æ/but a coda with /ɪ/). The present study explored the learning of phonototactic patterns conditioned on a suprasegmental cue: lexical stress. Adults first heard non-words in which trochaic and iambic items had different consonant restrictions. In Experiment 1, participants trained with phonotactic patterns involving natural classes of consonants later falsely recognized novel items that were consistent with the training patterns (legal items), demonstrating that they had learned the stress-conditioned phonotactic patterns. However, this was only true for iambic items. In Experiment 2, participants completed a forced-choice test between novel legal and novel illegal items and were again successful only for the iambic items. Experiment 3 demonstrated learning for trochaic items when they were presented alone. Finally, in Experiment 4, in which the training phase was lengthened, participants successfully learned both sets of phonotactic patterns. These experiments provide evidence that learners consider more global phonological properties in the computation of phonotactic patterns, and that learners can acquire multiple sets of patterns simultaneously, even contradictory ones.

KEYWORDS:

• Lexical stress
• Phonological features
• Phonotactic learning
• Statistical learning
• Suprasegmental

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Kavita Schaffer, Katelyn Burden, Amy Xu, Erik Johnson, Olivia Daub, and Danielle Vetter for assistance with data collection, as well as Tania Zamuner and an anonymous reviewer for helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There are strong relationships in English between the stress pattern of bisyllabic words and their lexical category, with the majority of nouns being trochaic and verbs more likely to be iambic (Kelly, 1992). Whether participants will implicitly categorize our stimuli according to lexical class is not clear. Regardless, the task of learning different phonotactic patterns for the two sets of items remains.

2. Traditional analysis of variance (ANOVA) analyses showed the same patterns of results for all experiments.

3. To confirm our primary analysis, we conducted further modelling in which our categorical labels for stress pattern (trochaic and iambic) for each stimulus item were replaced with pitch and intensity difference scores across syllables. We found the same pattern of results—participants falsely recognized more legal than illegal test items when items had stronger final syllables, but not when they had stronger initial syllables. This was true both when the intensity difference scores (β = −0.02, SE = 0.009, p < .01) and the pitch difference scores (β = −0.02, SE = 0.007, p < .01) were used (pitch difference scores were rescaled, divided by 10, to reduce the spread for modelling). Furthermore, models that used stress pattern, intensity difference, or pitch difference were found to be statistically equivalent to each other when compared.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an operating grant from the 10.13039/501100000038 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to K.S.W.