Aurilio M K, Jenkins J J, Silliman E R
Center for Communication Sciences, University of South Florida, Tampa 33620-8200, USA.
Psychol Rep. 2000 Jun;86(3 Pt 1):975-94. doi: 10.2466/pr0.2000.86.3.975.
This is a partial replication of Brooks, Braine, Catalano, Brody, and Sudhalter (1993). 32 participants learned a miniature linguistic system (MLS). Vocabulary of the MLS consisted of an actor subject, two sets of 19 object nouns, and two sets of three suffixes. In the experimental language, 60% of the nouns were phonologically marked with a common ending for each class; in the control, these endings were distributed across the classes. Participants were trained using pictures. Sentences about the pictures combined the actor's name with an object and an appropriate suffix that described the actor-object relation. A subset of possible sentences and objects was reserved for later testing. During generalization tests, participants had to produce sentences for pictures they had not seen during training. The experimental group was markedly superior to the control. The replication supports the earlier finding that learning of seemingly arbitrary linguistic classes can be facilitated by partial phonological cues.
