Contextual Constraints on Geminates: The Case of Polish

n/

Inductive inference in non-native speech processing and learning

Despite extensive research on language acquisition, our understanding of how people learn abstract linguistic structures remains limited. In the phonological domain, we know that perceptual reorganization in infancy results in attuning to native language (L1) phonetic categories and, consequently, in difficulty discriminating and learning non-native categories. This difficulty has been proposed to originate from novel sounds being perceptually mapped onto L1 phonetic categories, leading to massive L1 interference. However, ample evidence that the adult speech processing system preserves a considerable degree of plasticity suggests that more complex learning mechanisms might be in place. In this dissertation I propose an alternative theory in which non-native speech processing is guided by principles of hierarchical inductive inference regarding how likely a given phonetic dimension is to be phonologically informative in any novel language. This theory differs crucially from mapping theories in predicting that when a phonetic dimension is informative (e.g., phonologically contrastive) in one's native language, discriminations involving that dimension should be enhanced even among classes of sounds for which the dimension is not informative in the native language. I provide experimental evidence supporting the inductive theory, demonstrating that language learning goes beyond the acquisition of specific phonetic categories, and includes higher-order generalizations regarding the relative importance of phonetic dimensions in the language as a whole. I argue that this theory can be extended beyond phonetic category learning to other domains of language acquisition, and that it suggests that adults and infants recruit the same domain-general learning mechanisms when acquiring novel language

Inductive inference in non-native speech processing and learning

Despite extensive research on language acquisition, our understanding of how people learn abstract linguistic structures remains limited. In the phonological domain, we know that perceptual reorganization in infancy results in attuning to native language (L1) phonetic categories and, consequently, in difficulty discriminating and learning non-native categories. This difficulty has been proposed to originate from novel sounds being perceptually mapped onto L1 phonetic categories, leading to massive L1 interference. However, ample evidence that the adult speech processing system preserves a considerable degree of plasticity suggests that more complex learning mechanisms might be in place. In this dissertation I propose an alternative theory in which non-native speech processing is guided by principles of hierarchical inductive inference regarding how likely a given phonetic dimension is to be phonologically informative in any novel language. This theory differs crucially from mapping theories in predicting that when a phonetic dimension is informative (e.g., phonologically contrastive) in one's native language, discriminations involving that dimension should be enhanced even among classes of sounds for which the dimension is not informative in the native language. I provide experimental evidence supporting the inductive theory, demonstrating that language learning goes beyond the acquisition of specific phonetic categories, and includes higher-order generalizations regarding the relative importance of phonetic dimensions in the language as a whole. I argue that this theory can be extended beyond phonetic category learning to other domains of language acquisition, and that it suggests that adults and infants recruit the same domain-general learning mechanisms when acquiring novel language

The role of abstraction in non-native speech perception The role of abstraction in non-native speech perception

Abstract The end-result of perceptual reorganization in infancy is currently viewed as a reconfigured perceptual space, "warped" around native-language phonetic categories, which then acts as a direct perceptual filter on any non-native sounds: naïve-listener discrimination of non-nativesounds is determined by their mapping onto native-language phonetic categories that are acoustically/articulatorily most similar. We report results that suggest another factor in nonnative speech perception: some perceptual sensitivities cannot be attributed to listeners' warped perceptual space alone, but rather to enhanced general sensitivity along phonetic dimensions that the listeners' native language employs to distinguish between categories. Specifically, we show that the knowledge of a language with short and long vowel categories leads to enhanced discrimination of non-native consonant length contrasts. We argue that these results support a view of perceptual reorganization as the consequence of learners' hierarchical inductive inferences about the structure of the language's sound system: infants not only acquire the specific phonetic category inventory, but also draw higher-order generalizations over the set of those categories, such as the overall informativity of phonetic dimensions for sound categorization. Non-native sound perception is then also determined by sensitivities that emerge from these generalizations, rather than only by mappings of non-native sounds onto nativelanguage phonetic categories