This paper proposes a new experimental paradigm to explore the discriminability of languages, a question which is crucial to the child born in a bilingual environment. This paradigm employs the speech resynthesis technique, enabling the experimenter to preserve or degrade acoustic cues such as phonotactics, syllabic rhythm, or intonation from natural utterances. English and Japanese sentences w...

Phonological alternations often serve to modify forms so that they respect a phonotactic restriction that applies across the language. For example, the voicing alternation in the English plural produces word-final sequences that respect the general ban against a voiceless obstruent followed by a voiced one. Since Chomsky and Halle [1], it has been assumed that an adequate theory of phonology sh...

How do grammars assess the well-formedness of words with multiple phonotactic violations? Certain models predict that as strength restrictions decrease, forms violate should be less acceptable than expected, in a pattern we term super-linear cumulativity. We test this prediction using series Artificial Grammar Learning experiments, which vary number exceptions to patterns artificial languages. ...

is child phonology? Toward an integration of linguistic and psychological approaches. In M. Yavas (Ed.), First and second language phonology (pp. 9–44). San Diego, CA: Singular. Vitevitch, M. S. (1997). The neighborhood characteristics of malapropisms. Language and Speech, 40, 211–228. Vitevitch, M. S. (2001a). The influence of phonological similarity neighborhoods on speech production. Manuscr...

Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [n], the [n] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created an analogue to this phenomenon by having participants recite lists of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in 4 sessions on different days. In the first 2 experiments, some consonants were always onsets, so...

We ask whether an adult learner's knowledge of their native language impedes statistical learning in a new language beyond just word segmentation (as previously shown). In particular, we examine the impact of native-language word-form phonotactics on learners' ability to segment words into their component morphemes and learn phonologically triggered variation of morphemes. We find that learning...

It has been argued that words that contain difficultto-pronounce sound sequences may be avoided in production, causing words with difficult phonotactics to drop out of the language at a disproportionate rate. We argue that there is also an opposing pressure favoring phonetically unusual words. We show that, at least for adults, word learning is more successful for words with unfamiliar phonetic...

Previous research has shown that listeners make use of their knowledge of phonotactic constraints to segment speech into individual words. The present study investigates the influence of phonotactics when segmenting a non-native language. German and English listeners detected embedded English words in nonsense sequences. German listeners also had knowledge of English, but English listeners had ...