Phonological word-form learning

has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis requirement for the Master of Arts degree in Psychology at the May 2010 graduation. ii To Dad iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend a special thank you Jessi Hattori for recording the disyllabic and Jamie Tisdale for recording the monosyllabic nonword corpora used as stimuli in these experiments. I would also like to thank the many members of the Language and Memory Lab who assisted in data collection and scoring. iv ABSTRACT Seven experiments examined phonological word-form learning (i.e., the learning of novel wordlike sound patterns) after differing types of training. In each case, learning at the end of training was assessed via stem completion ability. Experiment 1 presented participants with eleven epochs of listening and repeating (incidental phonological learning) and found significant stem completion ability. The results of Experiment 2 showed greater stem completion ability after eleven epochs of listening and repeating along with repeated stem completion testing (deliberate phonological learning). Experiment 3 replicated results from Experiments 1 and 2 in a within-subject design and demonstrated that deliberate phonological learning is item-specific and not merely the result of generalized task facilitation. Experiment 4 measured stem completion ability after one hundred epochs of incidental phonological learning and found that it remained lower than after only eleven blocks of deliberate phonological learning in Experiments 2 and 3. Experiments 5, 6, and 7 utilized monosyllabic nonword stimuli, in contrast to the disyllabic nonword stimuli utilized in the first four experiments, and replicated the overall results from Experiments 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Taken together, these results suggest that incidental phonological learning does not yield full mastery of phonological word-forms.