Learning Phonotactic-Like Regularities in Immediate Serial Recall

Learning a spoken language requires learning a phonological inventory and phonotactics, or the sequences of phonemes possible in the language. Laboratory investigations of phonotactic learning include tongue-twister studies that show that speech errors respect artificial phonotactic constraints, for...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2021-01, Vol.47 (1), p.129-146
Main Authors: Fischer-Baum, Simon, Warker, Jill A, Holloway, Charli
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Constraints
Error Patterns
Errors
Human
Learning
Onset (Phonology)
Oral Communication
Phonemes
Phonology
Phonotactics
Probability
Recall (Psychology)
Serial Recall
Speech
Speech Communication
Speech errors
Spoken language
Statistics
Syllables
Tongue twisters
Undergraduate Students
Verbal communication
Word Order
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Summary:Learning a spoken language requires learning a phonological inventory and phonotactics, or the sequences of phonemes possible in the language. Laboratory investigations of phonotactic learning include tongue-twister studies that show that speech errors respect artificial phonotactic constraints, for example that /k/ never appears as a syllable onset. The current research investigates whether errors can reveal similar learning in nonlinguistic domains, specifically in immediate serial recall studies. In Experiments 1-3 participants recalled sequences of 6 items, grouped into two 3-item subsequences, in verbal immediate serial recall experiments. Some items were restricted to appear in specific sequence positions while others were unrestricted, as a parallel to the artificial phonotactics learning experiments. As with speech errors, recall errors with restricted items showed sensitivity to the statistical regularities built into the experiment. Similar results are shown for both absolute and probabilistic constraints. However, learning effects were weaker than in the phonological domain, and were less influenced by hierarchical structure than what is observed in phonotactic learning (Experiment 4). Taken together, these results suggest that there are both domain-general and language-specific constraints on phonotactic learning.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/xlm0000815