Behavioral and Neurodynamic Effects of Word Learning on Phonotactic Repair.

David W. Gow,Enes Avcu,Adriana Schoenhaut,Seppo P. Ahlfors

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.590155

Abstract

Processes governing the creation, perception and production of spoken words are sensitive to the patterns of speech sounds in the language user’s lexicon. Generative linguistic theory suggests that listeners infer constraints on possible sound patterning from the lexicon and apply these constraints to all aspects of word use. In contrast, emergentist accounts suggest that these phonotactic constraints are a product of interactive associative mapping with items in the lexicon. To determine the degree to which phonotactic constraints are lexically mediated, we observed the effects of learning new words that violate English phonotactic constraints (e.g., srigin) on phonotactic perceptual repair processes in nonword consonant-consonant-vowel (CCV) stimuli (e.g., /sre/). Subjects who learned such words were less likely to “repair” illegal onset clusters (/sr/) and report them as legal ones (/∫r/). Effective connectivity analyses of MRI-constrained reconstructions of simultaneously collected magnetoencephalography (MEG) and EEG data showed that these behavioral shifts were accompanied by changes in the strength of influences of lexical areas on acoustic-phonetic areas. These results strengthen the interpretation of previous results suggesting that phonotactic constraints on perception are produced by top-down lexical influences on speech processing.

Highlights

There is a close relationship between the lawful patterning of speech sounds and the cognitive processes that allow listeners to recognize and produce spoken language
Regions of interest were determined by identifying clusters of vertices with similar temporal activation patterns in the source estimates averaged over all trials and filtering out those with redundant information
Because we hypothesize that phonotactic repair involves influences on acoustic-phonetic representation, our critical results center around influences on left posterior STG (pSTG) (L_STG1), an area strongly associated with acoustic-phonetic representation, and top-down lexical effects on speech perception (Gow et al, 2008; Myers and Blumstein, 2008; Gow and Segawa, 2009; Gow and Olson, 2016)

Summary

Introduction

There is a close relationship between the lawful patterning of speech sounds and the cognitive processes that allow listeners to recognize and produce spoken language. All human languages impose constraints on how speech sounds can be combined to form syllables and words. These phonotactic constraints are systematic, language-specific and productive (Chomsky and Halle, 1968; Berent, 2013). They capture the intuition of English speakers that srib would not make a good English word, but slib would. This patterning has critical implications for language processing.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion