Structural constraints in the perception of English stop-sonorant clusters

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Phonology
• Auditory Perception

Background:

• Native language phonotactics influence non-native speech perception.
• Listeners may misperceive sounds to fit native phonological rules, like preferring [tr] over [tl] in English.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the linguistic knowledge underlying phonotactic perceptual bias.
• To compare unit models (frequency-based) against structure models (rule-based) of this bias.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments used synthetic stop-sonorant clusters with ambiguous consonants.
• Listeners judged consonant clusters, and bias was measured independently of stimulus.
• Compared perceptual bias for clusters violating different structural constraints and in varied syllable contexts.

Main Results:

• Results from both experiments supported structure models over unit models.
• Phonotactic perceptual bias is better explained by abstract phonological generalizations.

Conclusions:

• Abstract phonological rules, not just experience with cluster frequencies, shape speech perception.
• This provides evidence for structure-based accounts of phonotactic perceptual bias.