Northwestern Events Calendar

Nov
4
2022

Public PhD Dissertation Defense: Nicole Mirea - Role of Prior Knowledge in Adult Learning of Second-Order Phonotactic Generalizations for Speech Production

When: Friday, November 4, 2022
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM CT

Where: Cresap Laboratory, 101, 2021 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Talant Abdykairov  

Group: Linguistics Department

Category: Academic

Description:

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”—are consolidated during sleep in order to guide adults’ speech productions (Gaskell et al., 2014). The present work examines the role of prior knowledge in this process, testing the hypothesis that new phonotactic knowledge which is similar to previously-acquired knowledge benefits more from a consolidation opportunity. We did this by analyzing errors made in a tongue-twister task. We operationalized “similarity to 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; Exp. 1) and pre-trained restrictions learned during the course of the speech production study (Exp. 2). In a follow-up experiment in a non-linguistic sequential action domain (button-pressing), we tested whether the results we found in Exp. 1 were specific to speech production, or due to more general properties of sequential action production.

Taken together with previous work, our results suggest that consolidation serves to overcome interference between conflicting syllable position mappings in second-order phonotactic learning: in our experiments, this interference was weaker, so we observed evidence of phonotactic learning on Day 1. Although the data did not support our initial hypothesis, we did find evidence of transfer from phonotactic restrictions that had been previously learned in a similar environmental context, supporting a view of phonotactic learning in which restrictions are stored together with their contexts of acquisition (Dell et al., 2019), as well as an incremental account of phonotactic learning (Anderson et al., 2019). Our data additionally reflect the simultaneous influence of global (first-order) and local (second-order) sequential patterns on production, and results from the button-pressing experiment suggest that this may be required for efficient production. Moreover, differences across tasks indicate that the tendency to keep rhymes intact in errors may be language-specific. Overall, this research demonstrates prior knowledge’s multifaceted role in sequential pattern learning, which depends not only on similarity to new information and the opportunity for consolidation, but also on the environment in which that prior knowledge was acquired.

Register More Info Add to Calendar

Add Event To My Group:

Please sign-in