Role of Prior Knowledge in Adult Learning of Second-Order Phonotactic Generalizations for Speech Production

Mirea, Nicole Irene

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-w788-w080

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Role of Prior Knowledge in Adult Learning of Second-Order Phonotactic Generalizations for Speech Production

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Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns—those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as “if the vowel is [ɪ], then [s] can only appear at the end of the syllable”—require a period of sleep-based consolidation before adults can internalize them such that their speech errors conform to these generalizations in a tongue-twister task (Gaskell et al., 2014). The present work examines the role of prior knowledge in consolidating these second-order phonotactics for speech production, testing the hypothesis that new phonotactic knowledge which is similar to previously-acquired knowledge is easier to consolidate during sleep. We do this by analyzing errors made in a tongue-twister task (Chapter 2). We operationalize “similar prior knowledge” in terms of the syllable positions to which the consonants are constrained, and consider two sources of prior knowledge in these speech experiments: participants’ native language (English; Experiment 1) and pre-trained restrictions learned through tongue-twisters produced in the first experimental phase (Experiment 2). In a follow-up experiment in a non-linguistic sequential action domain (keypress sequence production; Chapter 3), we test whether the results we found in Experiment 1 were specific to speech production, or due to more general properties of sequential action. Our results indicate that global (first-order) and local (second-order) sequential patterns are simultaneously represented in production, and that this may be a necessary property of the schema for structured sequential action, in both speech and keypress sequence production. We found evidence of transfer from phonotactic restrictions that had been previously learned in a similar environmental context, supporting an incremental account of phonotactic learning (Anderson et al., 2019) as well as a view of phonotactic learning in which restrictions are stored together with their contexts of acquisition (Dell et al., 2019). Our results also suggest that consolidation’s main function in phonotactic learning for speech production is to resolve interference among multiple conflicting mappings between consonants and their syllable positions. Moreover, we found evidence that participants’ native language (English) may have affected their speech errors. Overall, this research demonstrates that prior knowledge’s complex role in sequential pattern learning, which depends not only on similarity to new information and opportunity for consolidation, but also on the environment in which that prior knowledge was acquired.

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