How do infants learn phonotactic regularities?
This experiment is designed to explore how 16-month-olds learn phonotactic regularities. These regularities consist of each language's rules for how sounds are put together and in what order they can occur. For example, a sequence like /gd/ would be phonotactically illegal because it is never found at the beginning of words, whereas /gr/ is very frequently used and thus legal. Previous experiments have used an artificial language learning task to test whether adults and infants learn new phonotactic constraints. In first-order constraints, subjects hear syllables in which two sets of consonants are always onsets, or always codas. For instance, /t/ and /k/ might be always onsets, the initial sound of the syllable, whereas /n/ and /l/ might be always codas, the final sound of the syllable. In these studies, subjects quickly became sensitive to novel phonotactic regularities, demonstrating that new sequential constraints were acquired by listening to CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) syllables. My study is an extension of these findings. It was not clear whether the first-order restrictions were learned as rules, such as /b/ is an onset, or as familiar sound sequences like /bI/ in the word /bIp/. These possibilities will be tested by looking at generalizations across vowels; if the vowels /ae/ and /I/ are studied (e.g. /baep/ and /bIp/), would the infant be able to generalize to the new vowel /E/ (e.g. /bEp/ and /pEb/)? In this study, phonotactic learning will be tested by using the Headturn Listening Preference task. A significant difference in listening times will show that regularities are being learned for legal and illegal items. This research will provide evidence to reveal infants' sensitivity to phonotactic cues and their methods for learning these regularities.
School:
University of South Florida
Department:
Language - Hearing - Speech Science / Audiology
Research Advisor:
Cynthia Fisher
Department of Research Advisor:
Psychology / Language Acquisition
Year of Publication:
2002