In Support of Phonological Bias in Implicit Learning

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In particular, learners who cannot verbalize a correct rule after the experiment nevertheless perform above chance on phonological patterns, but not the semantic ones. On the other hand, learners, particularly adults, are more likely to (explicitly) discover and successfully verbalize a rule based on a salient feature of animacy compared to a phonological feature based on the number of syllables. We discuss implications of these results in the context of a distinction between explicit and implicit learning mechanisms and how this distinction relates to the study of phonological bias.

Notes

¹ We cannot rely on the learning curves provided in the paper as a measure of explicit learning because these curves only show the trajectory of responses after most learning has already taken place during the initial 96 trials without feedback.

² The Martuthunira pattern mentioned earlier provides an example of syllable-sensitive allomorphy. Other examples include Eastern Armenian, in which plural allomorph is -er for monosyllabic bases and -ner for polysyllabic bases (Haspelmath & Sims, 2013, p. 160), and Estonian genitive plural allomorphs, which are analyzed by Kager (1996) as an interaction between metrical structure and morphology. Both shape and animacy commonly condition assignment of lexemes to noun classes (Corbett, 1991; Seifart, 2005).

³ Being a native speaker of English was listed as one of the prerequisites for participating in the study. Also, in the demographic post-questionnaire we asked participants to list their native language and any other languages they speak. We excluded those who did not list English as their native language.

⁴ It is very likely that children who always picked the last item did so because the label for the last item was slightly closer to the plural picture due to the words being centered on the screen (see Figure 4). In fact one child explicitly stated this as a reason for always picking the last item.

⁵ This child appears to have learned a collective vs. individuated plural distinction, interpreting the animate suffix as collective since most of the videos for plural animate nouns showed groups of animals, while pictures for inanimate objects showed multiple versions of the same object. We counted this response as correct because it was still based on a semantic distinction, and was consistent with the presented data.