Templaticity Effects on Differential Processing of Consonants and Vowels

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of morphophonology and written representations in speech processing. Results are presented from an immediate serial recall (ISR) study, designed to determine the relative effects of L1 morphology and orthography on the recall of consonants versus vowels. Forty-five speakers of English, Amharic, and Arabic completed an ISR experiment testing the differential recall of these two segment types. English speakers remembered sequences of syllables in which the consonant is held constant and the vowel changes (e.g., “ma mi mu …”) better than sequences in which the vowel is held constant and the consonant changes (e.g., “ka ma za …”), whereas Arabic speakers remembered both types of sequences equally well, replicating findings from Kissling (2012). Crucially, Amharic speakers in this study performed similarly to Arabic speakers, remembering both sequence types with equal accuracy. Given that Amharic and Arabic share a templatic morphological system, this new result suggests that the morphophonology of a listener’s L1 impacts ISR. English and Amharic share similar orthographic systems; the mean accuracies of English and Amharic speakers were significantly different, and it therefore appears that orthography of the L1 does not affect recall accuracy. The results have implications for the role of the morphophonology of a given speaker’s L1 in ISR and in speech processing more generally.