Abstract
In Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, phonotactics refers to the constraints on individual sounds in a given language that restrict how those sounds can be ordered to form words in that language. Previous empirical work in Psycholinguistics demonstrated that phonotactic knowledge influenced how quickly and accurately listeners retrieved words from that part of memory known as the mental lexicon. In the present study, we used three computer simulations to explore how three different cognitive network architectures could account for the previously observed effects of phonotactics on processing. The results of Simulation 1 showed that some—but not all—effects of phonotactics could be accounted for in a network where nodes represent words and edges connect words that are phonologically related to each other. In Simulation 2, a different network architecture was used to again account for some—but not all—effects of phonotactics and phonological neighborhood density. A bipartite network was used in Simulation 3 to account for many of the previously observed effects of phonotactic knowledge on spoken word recognition. The value of using computer simulations to explore different network architectures is discussed.
Highlights
In Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, phonotactics refers to the individual sounds that are used in a given language, as well as the constraints on how those sounds can be ordered to form words in that language [1,2,3]
In the cognitive network model implemented on spreadr, we found when looking at the activation values of the stimulus words that words with low neighborhood density/phonotactic probability had higher activation levels indicating that they were responded to more quickly and accurately than words with high neighborhood density/phonotactic probability
In the cognitive network model implemented on spreadr, we found when looking at the sum of the activation values of all of the other words in the network that had been partially activated at the end of five time-steps that words in the high phonotactic probability/neighborhood density condition had higher activation levels indicating they were responded to more quickly and accurately than words with low phonotactic probability/neighborhood density
Summary
In Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, phonotactics refers to the individual sounds (known as phonemes) that are used in a given language, as well as the constraints on how those sounds can be ordered to form words in that language [1,2,3]. The variability in the frequency with which phonemes and sequences occur in a language is referred to as phonotactic probability. In English words the phoneme /p/ and the sequence /pæv/ (“pav”) occurs often in words, and would be said to have high phonotactic probability. The phoneme /Z/ and the sequence /ðeZ/ (“thayzh”) occurs less often in English words and would be said to have low phonotactic probability
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