Novel phonotactic learning by children and infants: Generalizing syllable-position but not co-occurrence regularities

Restrictions in the sequencing of sounds (phonotactic constraints) can be represented at the level of sound co-occurrences (e.g., in baF.Pev, F and P co-occur) and at the level of the syllable (e.g., F is syllable-coda/end, P is syllable-onset/start). Can children (5-year-olds) and infants (11-month-olds) represent constraints as sound co-occurrences and/or relative to syllable positions? Participants listened to artificial languages displaying both word-medial consonant restrictions in co-occurrence pairs (e.g., FP or DZ but not FZ) and in the position of consonants within syllables (e.g., P/Z onsets and D/F codas) in words like baF.Pev and tiD.Zek. Children responded similarly to novel words with the same (e.g., FP) versus different (e.g., FZ) co-occurrence pairs, but they were more misled (i.e., responded "heard it before") by novel words with consonants in the same (e.g., onset-P) versus different (e.g., coda-P) syllable positions (Experiment 1). With the same training stimuli, infants had similar orientation times for novel words with the same versus different co-occurrence pairs, but they had longer orientation times for novel words with consonants in the same versus different syllable positions (Experiment 2). Thus, across different methods and ages, syllable-position information was more readily available for generalization than consonant co-occurrence information. The results suggest that when multiple regularities are present simultaneously, some phonotactic constraints (e.g., consonants in particular syllable positions) may be spontaneously represented and generalized by children and infants, whereas others (e.g., consonant co-occurrences) might not be available. The results contribute toward understanding how children and infants represent sound sequences.