Phonological Bias Research Articles

Consonant bias in adult lexical processing under acoustically degraded listening conditions.

Consonants facilitate lexical processing across many languages, including French. This study investigates whether acoustic degradation affects this phonological bias in an auditory lexical decision task. French words were processed using an eight-band vocoder, degrading their frequency modulations (FM) while preserving original amplitude modulations (AM). Adult French natives were presented with these French words, preceded by similarly processed pseudoword primes sharing their vowels, consonants, or neither. Results reveal a consonant bias in the listeners' accuracy and response times, despite the reduced spectral and FM information. These degraded conditions resemble current cochlear-implant processors, and attest to the robustness of this phonological bias.

Substantive Bias and Variation in the Acquisition of /n/~/l/ Alternation

Phonological biases suppose that language learners are predisposed toward certain sound patterns. A widely studied phonological bias is substantive bias, a bias that favors phonetically natural or motivated patterns. Experimental results for substantive bias have been mixed. Against this background, this study explores the possible factors influencing the effect of substantive bias, and the focus is on the input variability. An artificial language learning study on /n/~/l/ alternation by native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese was conducted. There were two categorical learning conditions and two variable learning conditions. In the categorical learning conditions, all the initial /n/ changed to /l/ either in phonetically motivated or unmotivated contexts. In the variable learning conditions, the dominant percentage of initial /n/ changed to /l/ in phonetically motivated or unmotivated context. Substantive bias arose only in variable learning conditions, which suggests that the substantive bias effect is not global, but it is activated under certain circumstances. This study found that the shape and distribution of input could influence the effect of substantive bias.

The influence of L2 experience on L1 speech perception: Evidence from Mandarin–English bilinguals

Aims: Previous studies have documented that consonants contribute more to lexically related processes than vowels in English, whereas an opposite pattern occurs in Mandarin Chinese processing. The current study aims to examine how the long-term learning of English (L2) influences Mandarin (L1) consonant, vowel, and tone perception in bilingual adults. It also attempts to examine the multi–competence theory at the level of speech perception. Methodology: A total of 73 Mandarin–English bilinguals with different L2 proficiency levels performed the L1 syllable perception task in an active oddball paradigm. The deviant syllables differed from the standard in consonant, vowel, or tone. Participants were asked to press a button whenever they heard a different syllable. Data and analysis: The reaction time and accuracy of each deviant syllable were recorded by E-prime 2.0. These data were analyzed using mixed-effects models. Findings/conclusions: Results showed that the relative role of vowel was the strongest, followed by consonant, and then by tone in L1 speech perception. The pattern of their relative roles/phonological bias was not influenced by L2 proficiency, indicating that the phonological bias in L1 speech perception is not affected by a transfer from non-native to native processing, but determined by the acoustic/phonological cues and lexical information carried by consonant, vowel, and tone. However, the perceptual sensitivity to L1 speech increased with L2 proficiency, demonstrating a positive L2 effect on L1 at the level of speech perception. Originality: The current study first investigated the influence of L2 experience on L1 phonological bias in bilinguals whose first and second languages were typologically distant. Significance/implications: Our findings lend support to the multi-competence theory and extend it to the level of speech perception.

Interaction of phonological biases and frequency in learning a probabilistic language pattern

We examine how learning a phonological rule in an artificial language interacts with morphological and lexical learning. We exposed adult participants to an artificial language in which noun plurals were marked by one of two prefix forms (ba- or ni-), one of which also triggered a velar palatalization rule (e.g., singular kimu, plural ni-chimu). In some conditions, the rule additionally created homophony. We also manipulated the relative frequency of the two prefix variants. The results showed that participants shifted away from using the rule-triggering prefix (ni-), but only when it was already the less frequent prefix. We attribute this effect to a paradigm uniformity bias leading participants to avoid phonological alternations (particularly in the stem). When the rule created homophony between lexical items, participants were less able to learn the rule, but it did not affect their choice of prefix. We attribute this effect to homophony avoidance interfering with participants' ability to extract the phonological generalization.

The Impact of Phonological Biases on Mispronunciation Sensitivity and Novel Accent Adaptation

ABSTRACT Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers’ lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers are exposed to a novel accent in which these changes occur systematically. The flexibility to deal with different types of variation may not be the same for toddlers learning different first languages, however, as language structure shapes early phonological biases. We examined French-learning 19-month-olds’ sensitivity and adaptation to a novel accent that shifted either the standard pronunciation of /a/ from [a] to [ɛ] (Experiment 1) or the standard pronunciation of /p/ from [p] to [t] (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, French-learning toddlers recognized words with /a/ produced as [ɛ], regardless of whether they were previously exposed to an accent that contained this vowel shift or not. In Experiment 2, toddlers did not recognize words with /p/ pronounced as [t] at test unless they were first familiarized with an accent that contained this consonant shift. These findings are consistent with evidence that French-learning toddlers privilege consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Together with previous work, these results demonstrate both differences and similarities in how French- and English-learning children treat variation, in line with their language-specific phonological biases.

The extraction of orthographic and phonological structure of printed words in adults with dyslexia.

The current study investigated the extraction of orthographic and phonological structure of written words in adults with dyslexia. In adults without learning difficulties, Chetail and Content showed that orthographic structure, as determined by the number of vowel letter clusters, influences visual word length estimation. The authors also found a phonological effect determined by the number of syllables of words. In the present study, 22 French-speaking students diagnosed with dyslexia in childhood and 22 students without learning disabilities were compared. All participants performed the task of estimating word length. The pattern of results obtained by Chetail and Content was replicated: length estimates were biased by both the number of syllables and the number of vowel letter clusters. The study showed a significant interaction between phonological bias and group. The phonological effect was less important in students with dyslexia, suggesting reduced sensitivity to phonological parsing in reading. In contrast, the orthographic effect did not differ significantly between groups, suggesting that the sensitivity to the orthographic structure of written words is preserved in students with dyslexia despite their low-quality orthographic representations. We conclude that there is no systematic association between sensitivity to the structure of representations and quality of their content.

In Support of Phonological Bias in Implicit Learning

ABSTRACT This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In particular, learners who cannot verbalize a correct rule after the experiment nevertheless perform above chance on phonological patterns, but not the semantic ones. On the other hand, learners, particularly adults, are more likely to (explicitly) discover and successfully verbalize a rule based on a salient feature of animacy compared to a phonological feature based on the number of syllables. We discuss implications of these results in the context of a distinction between explicit and implicit learning mechanisms and how this distinction relates to the study of phonological bias.

Variation in phonological bias: Bias for vowels, rather than consonants or tones in lexical processing by Cantonese-learning toddlers

Consonants and vowels have been considered to fulfill different functions in language processing, vowels being more important for prosodic and syntactic processes and consonants for lexically related processes (Nespor, Peña, & Mehler, 2003). This C-bias hypothesis in lexical processing is supported by studies with adults and infants in many languages such as English, French, Spanish, although a few studies, on Danish and Mandarin, suggest the existence of cross-linguistic variation. The present study explores whether a C-bias exists in a tone language with a complex tone system, Cantonese, by comparing the relative weight given to consonants, vowels, and also tones during word learning. To do so, looking behaviors of Cantonese-learning 20- and 30-month-olds (24 children per age/condition, 6 groups) were recorded by an eyetracker while they watched animated cartoons in Cantonese to learn pairs of novel words. The words differed minimally by either a consonant (e.g., /tœ6/ vs. /kœ6/), a vowel (e.g., /khim3/ vs. /khɛm3/), or a tone (e.g., T2 vs. T5). Analyses on proportional looking times revealed significant learning in 30-month-olds only, and at that age, only for the vowel contrasts. Growth curve analyses revealed better performance for the vowel condition compared to the other two conditions. The present findings establish a V-bias in Cantonese-learning 30-month-olds, adding new evidence from that tone language that the C-bias in lexical processing is not language-general. Implications for theoretical discussions on the origins of this phonological bias, and the impact of tones in early language acquisition, are discussed.

A working memory related mechanism of auditory hallucinations.

Cognitive mechanisms underlying auditory hallucinations (AH) in schizophrenia have been related to working memory (WM), although the formative mechanism is unknown. The phonological loop refers to subvocal rehearsals of information held online for supporting WM. As WM deficiency is frequent in schizophrenia, we hypothesized that AH and WM deficit share a common dysfunction in phonological loop operation, especially when it is taxed by ambiguous auditory and verbal associations. We developed an active phonological priming (APP) paradigm in which participants generated arbitrary verbal associations to pseudowords with ambiguous meaning. They were later asked to rate their familiarity to each pseudoword, a task that required subvocal evaluation of ambiguous auditory-verbal information. Factor and mediation analyses were used to test the hypothesis that WM, AH, and APP induced phonological bias toward perceiving ambiguous contents as familiar may share a common underlying mechanism. In 32 patients with schizophrenia (SZ) and 20 healthy controls (HC), SZ rated ambiguous pseudowords as significantly more familiar compared with HC (p = .006), indicating a proneness to APP-induced bias. This increased subjective bias to perceive ambiguous contents as familiar after APP significantly correlated with AH severity (p = .001) and mediated the relationship between WM and AH. Factor analysis demonstrated a common latent factor among WM, AH, and the bias induced by active priming to ambiguous contents. A heightened phonological loop priming to ambiguous contents appears to be mechanistically linked to WM deficits and AH in schizophrenia. These findings emphasize the importance of jointly addressing WM deficits and AH in clinical practice and research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Second language learners develop non-native lexical processing biases

AbstractInfants develop language-specific biases favoring either consonantal or vocalic information. These phonological biases affect various levels of spoken-language recognition in children and adults. This study explored whether adults who speak a second language (L2) apply phonological biases during L2 lexical processing, and whether the biases applied are those of the native language (L1), or those appropriate for the L2. Two word reconstruction experiments were carried out in English and Mandarin Chinese. L1 and L2 speakers of English demonstrated a consonantal bias by changing English vowels faster than consonants. L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin demonstrated a vocalic bias by changing Mandarin consonants faster than vowels. Even relatively late L2 classroom learners whose L1 triggers a consonantal bias (English) exhibited a vocalic bias in their L2 (Mandarin). Lexically related processing biases are thus determined by the phonological and lexical characteristics of the stimuli being processed and not solely by listeners’ L1.

Children’s Sensitivity to Phonological and Semantic Cues During Noun Class Learning: Evidence for a Phonological Bias

Children’s Sensitivity to Phonological and Semantic Cues During Noun Class Learning: Evidence for a Phonological Bias

Children’s sensitivity to phonological and semantic cues during noun class learning: Evidence for a phonological bias

Previous research on the acquisition of noun classification systems (e.g. grammatical gender) has found that child learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues to determine the class of a new noun, even when competing semantic cues are more reliable in their language. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) use artificial language learning experiments with adults to argue that this likely results from the early availability of phonological information during acquisition. Learners base their initial representations on formal features of nouns, only later integrating semantic cues from noun meanings. Here, we use these same methods to show that early availability affects cue use in children (six- to seven-year-olds) as well. However, we also find evidence of developmental changes in sensitivity to semantics; when both cue types are simultaneously available, children are more likely to rely on phonology than adults are. Our results suggest that both early availability and a bias favoring phonological cues contribute to children’s overreliance on phonology in natural language acquisition.

Phonological and auditory context effects in the perception of synthetic liquid-plus-stop clusters

In experiments with English synthetic stops in the /VCCV/ disyllables /arga, alga, arda, alda/, listeners give more /‐da/ responses after /ar‐/ syllables [see, e.g., A. Lotto and K. Kluender, Percept. Psychophys. 60, 602–619 (1998)]. The importance of general auditory contrast compared to more specific phonetic mechanisms is a key issue in the literature. In three experiments that used factorially crossed F3 continua for both the liquid /r-l/ and for the stop /g-d/, we recorded responses to all four disyllables (4 alternative forced choice). Experiments 1 and 2 both showed that categorizing the liquid as /r/ biases stop responses toward /d/. However, Experiment 1, which involved a 4-step extreme-/r/ to extreme-/l/ continuum, showed effects consistent with auditory contrast of the F3 values across the stop. Experiment 2 focused on the ambiguous region of the /l-r/ continuum [sampled in 7 steps]. While a clear effect of the [-rd-] phonological bias remained, there was little reliable evidence of contrast effects in F3 across the stop gap. Here, we report analyses of a new larger (n > 60) Experiment 3 with more stimuli (70 compared to less than 50 each) that subsumes the ranges of the previous two experiments. We evaluate the hypothesis (among others) that the auditory-contrast-like effect is confined largely to stimuli with relatively low F3 at the offset of the /VC-/ syllable.

The Role of Phonology in Phonetic Change

This article reviews the role phonology plays in phonetic changes. After first establishing what kinds of changes qualify as phonetic changes for the purposes of discussion, and laying out the theoretical outlook that is adopted here, I review the most obvious cases in which phonology plays a role in phonetic change. These include (a) the way phonological contrast can lead to phonetic dispersion, (b) the way phonological natural classes can define a set of segments to undergo a parallel phonetic shift, and (c) how phonological biases may lead to instances of underphonologization. Throughout, I discuss alternative approaches to these phenomena.

Vowel bias in Danish word-learning: processing biases are language-specific.

The present study explored whether the phonological bias favoring consonants found in French-learning infants and children when learning new words (Havy & Nazzi, 2009; Nazzi, 2005) is language-general, as proposed by Nespor, Peña and Mehler (2003), or varies across languages, perhaps as a function of the phonological or lexical properties of the language in acquisition. To do so, we used the interactive word-learning task set up by Havy and Nazzi (2009), teaching Danish-learning 20-month-olds pairs of phonetically similar words that contrasted either on one of their consonants or one of their vowels, by either one or two phonological features. Danish was chosen because it has more vowels than consonants, and is characterized by extensive consonant lenition. Both phenomena could disfavor a consonant bias. Evidence of word-learning was found only for vocalic information, irrespective of whether one or two phonological features were changed. The implication of these findings is that the phonological biases found in early lexical processing are not language-general but develop during language acquisition, depending on the phonological or lexical properties of the native language.

Accent classes in South Kyengsang Korean: Lexical drift, novel words and loanwords

This paper examines changes in the accent class affiliation of c. 1900 words from Middle Korean into the modern South Kyengsang dialect. The data present the profile of a canonical analogical change: words are attracted to larger lexical classes and words of lower token frequency are more likely to change their affiliation. Several properties of the syllable onset and coda as well as syllable weight are shown to bias a word to particular accent classes. A novel word experiment suggests that speakers have tacit knowledge of some of these phonological biases but not others. The paper considers whether these biases can explain the default accent assigned to English loanwords and whether they can be modeled with weighted constraints in a Maxent grammar.

Writing dictated words and picture names: Syllabic boundaries affect execution in Spanish

ABSTRACTTwo experiments examined the role of syllables in writing Spanish words. In Experiment 1, participants had to write single words that were aurally presented. The interletter intervals (ILIs) between critical letters were measured. Longer ILIs were found in the intersyllabic than the intrasyllabic condition. In Experiment 2, the inputs were pictures to remove any potential phonological bias stemming from the input stimulus. Results suggested that the linguistic nature of the input is not determining the output. Post hoc analyses revealed that other characteristics of the stimuli cannot explain the results. These results indicate that syllables are essential units of processing in writing Spanish and that central processes related to spelling and the graphemic buffer affect peripheral processes at movement execution.

Pointing and Labeling Directions in Egocentric Frameworks

In three experiments, people learned descriptions of layouts and were then tested on the locations of objects in the layouts. Learning occurred either by using arrow-keys (a pointing-like procedure) or naming directions (front, back, right, left) to explore the layout, and testing involved either arrow-keys or verbal responses. In Experiment 1a, using arrow keys during learning and testing, right/left judgments were made faster than front/back judgments (reverse pattern). In Experiment 2a, direction labels were used during learning and testing, and front/back judgments were made faster than right/left, replicating the standard pattern obtained by Franklin & Tversky (1990). In Experiment 3 subjects learned the layout using direction labels and were tested with arrow-keys and the reverse pattern was found again. Response biases (Experiments 1b and 1c) and phonological biases (Experiment 2b) were ruled out as explanations for the patterns obtained. The pragmatics and requirements involved in each modality accounts for the accessibility patterns obtained with pointing and verbal labeling.

Click monitoring revisited: an on-line study of sentence comprehension.

Spoken sentence comprehension is based upon rapid and complex psychological processes, yielding a constantly fluctuating cognitive load. The aim of this study was to evaluate on-line click monitoring, a classical but poorly exploited experimental method, which should allow for an easy measurement of processing load at any chosen point of experimental sentences. In Experiments 1 and 2, we obtained longer latencies to clicks located at the boundary of reversible object relative clauses than to clicks identically located in subject relatives and to clicks located earlier within object relatives. Experiment 3 further revealed that this effect of syntactic type was specific to transposed object relatives and did not occur with normal object relatives. In Experiment 4, we observed longer latencies with semantically reversible than with irreversible sentences, but no difference between actives and passives. These results were obtained under strict control of potential lexical and phonological biases, and suggest that on-line click monitoring may be one useful tool in the study of sentence comprehension.

Laboratory Verification of “Freudian” Slips of the Tongue as Evidence of Prearticulatory Semantic Editing

Earlier research has shown that spoonerisms (e.g., wage rate → rage wait) can be elicited by a laboratory technique in which subjects attempt to articulate a target (wage rate) preceded by biasing word items containing certain phonological characteristics of the designed error (rage wait). The frequency of errors on various targets depends more upon the linguistic characteristics of their potential spoonerism than upon the characteristics of the targets themselves, suggesting that subjects “edit” phoneme strings prior to articulation. Phonological and lexical criteria have been established within the prearticulatory editing operations. The present report describes two experiments designed to determine whether these prearticulatory edits involve semantic criteria. In Experiment 1, the base-rate of errors produced by the phonetic bias technique was dramatically increased by adding (to the phonological bias) items which were semantically synonymous to the designed target errors. In Experiment 2, the base-rate of errors was increased by manipulating subjects into a situational cognitive set consonant with the semantic implications of the designed target errors. Results imply a semantic criterion in the prearticulatory editing operations of natural speech encoding—a semantic criterion very much like that which has been assumed for “Freudian slips.” Implications are discussed.