TY  - JOUR
A1  - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie
A1  - Kager, Rene
T1  - OCP-Place in speech segmentation
JF  - Language and speech
N2  - OCP-Place, a cross-linguistically well-attested constraint against pairs of consonants with shared [place], is psychologically real. Studies have shown that the processing of words violating OCP-Place is inhibited. Functionalists assume that OCP arises as a consequence of low-level perception: a consonant following another with the same [place] cannot be faithfully perceived as an independent unit. If functionalist theories were correct, then lexical access would be inhibited if two homorganic consonants conjoin at word boundaries-a problem that can only be solved with lexical feedback.
 Here, we experimentally challenge the functional account by showing that OCP-Place can be used as a speech segmentation cue during pre-lexical processing without lexical feedback, and that the use relates to distributions in the input.
 In Experiment 1, native listeners of Dutch located word boundaries between two labials when segmenting an artificial language. This indicates a use of OCP-Labial as a segmentation cue, implying a full perception of both labials. Experiment 2 shows that segmentation performance cannot solely be explained by well-formedness intuitions. Experiment 3 shows that knowledge of OCP-Place depends on language-specific input: in Dutch, co-occurrences of labials are under-represented, but co-occurrences of coronals are not. Accordingly, Dutch listeners fail to use OCP-Coronal for segmentation.
KW  - Artificial language learning
KW  - OCP-Place
KW  - phonotactics
KW  - speech segmentation
KW  - pre-lexical processing
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830913508074
SN  - 0023-8309
SN  - 1756-6053
VL  - 57
IS  - 3
SP  - 394
EP  - 421
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie
A1  - Kager, Rene
T1  - Is speech processing influenced by abstract or detailed phonotactic representations? The case of the Obligatory Contour Principle
JF  - Lingua : international review of general linguistics
N2  - 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. 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.
KW  - OCP
KW  - Artificial language learning
KW  - Speech segmentation
KW  - Phonotactics
KW  - Identity
KW  - Phonotactic probability
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.11.008
SN  - 0024-3841
SN  - 1872-6135
VL  - 171
SP  - 74
EP  - 91
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -