Phonological features and phonotactic constraints in speech production

Abstract

Languages are subject to phonotactic constraints—restrictions on sound sequences. An implicit learning paradigm examined whether participants could acquire constraints at two levels of representation through exposure to a set of syllables. Participants were exposed to categorical segment-level constraints (e.g., /f/ only in onset, /s/ only in coda) as well as gradient featural-level constraints (e.g., labiodental fricatives /v/ and /f/ occurred in onset position 75% of the time, coda 25%). Speech errors revealed that participants encoded constraints at both levels of representation. By biasing errors towards a single syllable position, segmental constraints strengthened the tendency of errors to preserve target syllable position (e.g., virtually no /s/ errors occurred in onset). In contrast, since the featural constraint allowed errors to occur in both syllable positions, encoding it weakened the tendency to preserve target syllable position (e.g., /f/ errors, influenced by featural as well as segmental constraints, surfaced in coda more often than /s/ errors surfaced in onset). Finally, participants in a second study failed to learn featural constraints for dorsal stop consonants. The implications of these results for the representation and processing of features are discussed.