Examining the role of nonadjacent phonotactic dependencies in the perception of spoken language

Abstract

At the previous ASA meeting we presented results on experiments investigating the learning of nonadjacent phonotactic dependencies in the perception of spoken language. Previous research had provided evidence for the learning of nonadjacent dependencies at a grammatical level (e.g., Gomez, 2002). Our research examined whether such learning was possible at a phonological level. Each learner was exposed to CVC nonword stimuli produced by one of two artificial languages. Both languages contained the same adjacent dependencies so learners could only distinguish the languages by acquiring dependencies between the initial and final Cs (i.e., the nonadjacent dependencies). Our results demonstrated that subsequent perception was facilitated for stimuli with the same nonadjacent phonotactic dependencies. In the current study, we extended this line of research by evaluating the role of nonadjacent phonotactic dependencies in nonwords that had been lexicalized. In particular, we asked whether the previous effect of facilitation would now manifest itself as inhibition, presumably due to the competition between lexicalized items sharing nonadjacent phonotactic dependencies.