Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University.
Department of Psychology, University of Scranton.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2021 Jan;47(1):129-146. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000815. Epub 2020 Jan 13.
Learning a spoken language requires learning a phonological inventory and phonotactics, or the sequences of phonemes possible in the language. Laboratory investigations of phonotactic learning include tongue-twister studies that show that speech errors respect artificial phonotactic constraints, for example that /k/ never appears as a syllable onset. The current research investigates whether errors can reveal similar learning in nonlinguistic domains, specifically in immediate serial recall studies. In Experiments 1-3 participants recalled sequences of 6 items, grouped into two 3-item subsequences, in verbal immediate serial recall experiments. Some items were restricted to appear in specific sequence positions while others were unrestricted, as a parallel to the artificial phonotactics learning experiments. As with speech errors, recall errors with restricted items showed sensitivity to the statistical regularities built into the experiment. Similar results are shown for both absolute and probabilistic constraints. However, learning effects were weaker than in the phonological domain, and were less influenced by hierarchical structure than what is observed in phonotactic learning (Experiment 4). Taken together, these results suggest that there are both domain-general and language-specific constraints on phonotactic learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
学习口语需要学习语音系统和音系学，或者说语言中可能出现的音位序列。对音系学学习的实验室研究包括绕口令研究，这些研究表明言语错误尊重人为的音系学限制，例如/k/永远不会出现在音节开头。当前的研究调查错误是否可以揭示非语言领域的类似学习，特别是在即时序列回忆研究中。在实验 1-3 中，参与者在口头即时序列回忆实验中回忆 6 个项目的序列，这些项目分为两个 3 个项目的子序列。一些项目被限制出现在特定的序列位置，而其他项目不受限制，这与人为的音系学学习实验类似。与言语错误一样，受限制项目的回忆错误对实验中内置的统计规律表现出敏感性。绝对限制和概率限制都显示出类似的结果。然而，学习效果比在语音领域弱，并且受层次结构的影响小于在音系学学习中观察到的（实验 4）。总之，这些结果表明，音系学学习既有一般领域的限制，也有语言特有的限制。
