Rapid learning of morphologically conditioned phonetics: Vowel nasalization across a boundary*

Abstract

That widely attested phonological processes and measurable articulatory and perceptual processes are highly related seems clear. But how that correlation is realized is an issue of much debate. An artificial grammar learning experiment tested the ability of participants to learn an association that was conditioned on a morphological boundary, but that consisted of acoustic information that was sub-phonemic in nature (degree of nasalization on a pre-nasal vowel, which is never contrastive in English). Success in learning indicates that even over short time periods listeners can assimilate novel phonetic cues. Furthermore, the results show that grammatical and sub-grammatical components of the linguistic system have the ability to interact. These results are also consistent with a historical phonetic origin for a class of common phonological phenomena: processes that only apply (or only fail to apply) in derived environments (that is at morphological boundaries).