Department of Linguistics, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2022 Sep;226:105170. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105170. Epub 2022 Jun 15.
We examine how learning a phonological rule in an artificial language interacts with morphological and lexical learning. We exposed adult participants to an artificial language in which noun plurals were marked by one of two prefix forms (ba- or ni-), one of which also triggered a velar palatalization rule (e.g., singular kimu, plural ni-chimu). In some conditions, the rule additionally created homophony. We also manipulated the relative frequency of the two prefix variants. The results showed that participants shifted away from using the rule-triggering prefix (ni-), but only when it was already the less frequent prefix. We attribute this effect to a paradigm uniformity bias leading participants to avoid phonological alternations (particularly in the stem). When the rule created homophony between lexical items, participants were less able to learn the rule, but it did not affect their choice of prefix. We attribute this effect to homophony avoidance interfering with participants' ability to extract the phonological generalization.
我们考察了在人工语言中学习语音规则如何与形态和词汇学习相互作用。我们让成年参与者接触一种人工语言，其中名词复数由两种前缀形式之一标记（ba-或 ni-），其中一种还触发了软腭化规则（例如，单数 kimu，复数 ni-chimu）。在某些条件下，该规则还会造成同音异义词。我们还操纵了两个前缀变体的相对频率。结果表明，当规则触发的前缀（ni-）已经是较不常见的前缀时，参与者会避免使用该前缀。我们将这种效果归因于范式一致性偏见，使参与者避免语音交替（尤其是在词干中）。当规则在词汇项目之间造成同音异义词时，参与者学习规则的能力会下降，但这不会影响他们对前缀的选择。我们将这种效果归因于同音异义词避免干扰参与者提取语音概括的能力。
