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Is speech processing influenced by abstract or detailed phonotactic representations? The case of the Obligatory Contour Principle

  • Many languages restrict their lexicons by OCP-Place, a phonotactic constraint against co-occurrences of consonants with shared [place] (e.g., McCarthy, 1986). While many previous studies have suggested that listeners have knowledge of OCP-Place and use this for speech processing, it is less clear whether they make reference to an abstract representation of this constraint. In Dutch, OCP-Place gradiently restricts non-adjacent consonant co-occurrences in the lexicon. Focusing on labial-vowel-labial co-occurrences, we found that there are, however, exceptions from the general effect of OCP-Labial: (A) co-occurrences of identical labials are systematically less restricted than co-occurrences of homorganic labials, and (B) some specific pairs (e.g., /pVp/, /bVv/) occur more often than expected. Setting out to study whether exceptions such as (A) and (B) had an effect on processing, the current study presents an artificial language learning experiment and a reanalysis of Boll-Avetisyan and Kager's (2014) speech segmentation data. ResultsMany languages restrict their lexicons by OCP-Place, a phonotactic constraint against co-occurrences of consonants with shared [place] (e.g., McCarthy, 1986). While many previous studies have suggested that listeners have knowledge of OCP-Place and use this for speech processing, it is less clear whether they make reference to an abstract representation of this constraint. In Dutch, OCP-Place gradiently restricts non-adjacent consonant co-occurrences in the lexicon. Focusing on labial-vowel-labial co-occurrences, we found that there are, however, exceptions from the general effect of OCP-Labial: (A) co-occurrences of identical labials are systematically less restricted than co-occurrences of homorganic labials, and (B) some specific pairs (e.g., /pVp/, /bVv/) occur more often than expected. Setting out to study whether exceptions such as (A) and (B) had an effect on processing, the current study presents an artificial language learning experiment and a reanalysis of Boll-Avetisyan and Kager's (2014) speech segmentation data. Results indicate that Dutch listeners can use both knowledge of phonotactic detail and an abstract constraint OCP-Labial as a cue for speech segmentation. We suggest that whether detailed or abstract representations are drawn on depends on the complexity of processing demands.show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author details:Natalie Boll-AvetisyanORCiDGND, Rene Kager
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.11.008
ISSN:0024-3841
ISSN:1872-6135
Title of parent work (English):Lingua : international review of general linguistics
Publisher:Elsevier
Place of publishing:Amsterdam
Publication type:Article
Language:English
Year of first publication:2016
Publication year:2016
Release date:2020/03/22
Tag:Artificial language learning; Identity; OCP; Phonotactic probability; Phonotactics; Speech segmentation
Volume:171
Number of pages:18
First page:74
Last Page:91
Funding institution:Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [277-70-001]
Peer review:Referiert
Institution name at the time of the publication:Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Exzellenzbereich Kognitionswissenschaften
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