Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, United States of America.
Department of Linguistics, University College London, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2021 Apr;209:104573. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104573. Epub 2021 Jan 3.
Phonemes have variant pronunciations depending on context. For instance, in American English, the [t] in pat [pæt] and the [d] in pad [pæd] are both realized with a tap [ɾ] when the -ing suffix is attached, [pæɾɪŋ]. We show that despite greater distributional and acoustic support for the [t]-tap alternation, 12-month-olds successfully relate taps to stems with a perceptually-similar final [d], not the dissimilar final-[t]. Thus, distributional learning of phonological alternations is constrained by infants' preference for the alternation of perceptually-similar segments. Further, the ability to relate variant surface forms emerges between 8- and 12-months. Our findings of biased learning provide further empirical support for a role for perceptual similarity in the acquisition of linguistically-relevant categories. We discuss the implications of our findings for phonological theory, language acquisition and models of the mental lexicon.
音位的发音会因语境而异。例如，在美语中，单词 pat [pæt] 中的 [t] 和 pad [pæd] 中的 [d] 在加上后缀 -ing 时，都发舌尖齿龈无擦通音 [ɾ]，即 [pæɾɪŋ]。我们发现，尽管 [t]-tap 交替的分布和声学支持更大，但 12 个月大的婴儿成功地将 tapp 与具有相似感知终音 [d]的词干相关联，而不是与不相似的终音 [t]相关联。因此，音位交替的分布学习受到婴儿对相似感知段交替的偏好的限制。此外，将变体表面形式相关联的能力在 8 至 12 个月之间出现。我们对有偏向的学习的发现为感知相似性在语言相关范畴习得中的作用提供了进一步的经验支持。我们讨论了我们的发现对音系学理论、语言习得和心理词汇模型的影响。
