Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-b6zl4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-08T14:24:08.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A naturalness bias in learning stress*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2010

Angela C. Carpenter
Angela C. Carpenter
Affiliation:
Wellesley College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent research on the acquisition of natural vs. unnatural phonological processes provides some support for the idea that learning a natural process is easier than learning an unnatural one (Wilson 2003, 2006, Pycha et al.2003, Pater & Tessier 2005). This study extends those findings by comparing the acquisition of two stress patterns that are identical except in naturalness. Learners were native speakers of English, a language with variable stress, and French, a fixed stress language. Both English and French speakers learned the natural pattern significantly better than the unnatural. The artificial languages specifically neutralised the phonetic cues that might have given a perceptual advantage to the natural language. The findings suggest that a naturalness bias aids in the distinguishing and learning of a phonological pattern. To explain the results, I argue for an interaction between a general and a language-specific cognitive mechanism.

Type
Articles
Information
Phonology , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , December 2010 , pp. 345 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abramson, Marianne & Goldinger, Stephen D. (1997). What the reader's eye tells the mind's ear: silent reading activates inner speech. Perception and Psychophysics 59. 1059–1068.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Aleman, André & van 't Wout, Mascha (2004). Subvocalization in auditory-verbal imagery: just a form of motor imagery? Cognitive Processing 5. 228–231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Archibald, John (1995). The acquisition of stress. In Archibald, John (ed.) Phonological acquisition and phonological theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 81–109.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Susan (1999). Stress and weight in Quebec French. MA thesis, University of Calgary.Google Scholar
Baddeley, Alan, Eldridge, Marge & Lewis, Vivien (1981). The role of subvocalisation in reading. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 33A. 439–454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barrett, H. Clark, Frankenhuis, Willem E. & Wilke, Andreas (2008). Adaptation to moving targets: culture/gene coevolution, not either/or. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31. 511–512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, Juliette (2004). Evolutionary Phonology: the emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul (1997). How we learn variation, optionality, and probability. Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam 21. 43–58.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2006). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 4.5.02). http://www.praat.org/.Google Scholar
Broselow, Ellen, Chen, Su-I & Wang, Chilin (1998). The emergence of the unmarked in second language phonology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20. 261–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buckley, P. B. & Gilman, C. B. (1974). Comparison of digits and dot patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 103. 1131–1136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Burzio, Luigi (1994). Principles of English stress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardona, George (1965). A Gujarati reference grammar. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chambers, Kyle E., Onishi, Kristine H. & Fisher, Cynthia (2003). Infants learn phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience. Cognition 87. B69–B77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Charette, Monik (1991). Conditions on phonological government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Halle, Morris (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Christiansen, Morten H. & Chater, Nick (2008). Language as shaped by the brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31. 489–509.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clements, G. N. (1990). The role of the sonority cycle in core syllabification. In Kingston, John & Beckman, Mary E. (eds.) Papers in laboratory phonology I: between the grammar and physics of speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 283–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cygankin, D. V. & Davaev, C. Z. (1975). Ocherk sravnitel'oi grammatiki mordovskix (mokshanskogo i erz'anskogo) literaturnyx iazykov. Saransk: Mordovskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet Imeni N. P. Ogareva.Google Scholar
Dechaine, Rose-Marie (1990). Stress and weight gain. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
de Lacy, Paul (2002). The formal expression of markedness. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
de Lacy, Paul (2004). Markedness conflation in Optimality Theory. Phonology 21. 145–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delattre, Pierre (1939). Accent de mot et accent de groupe. The French Review 13. 141–146.Google Scholar
Dell, François (1980). Generative phonology and French phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dell, Gary S., Reed, Kristopher D., Adams, David R. & Meyer, Antje S. (2000). Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: a study of the role of experience in language production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 26. 1355–1367.Google ScholarPubMed
Dupoux, Emmanuel, Pallier, Christophe, Sebastián, Núria & Mehler, Jacques (1997). A destressing ‘deafness’ in French? Journal of Memory and Language 36. 406–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esper, Erwin Allen (1925). A technique for the experimental investigation of associative interference in Artificial Language Material. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America.Google Scholar
Fant, Gunnar, Kruckenberg, Anita & Nord, Lennart (1991). Durational correlates of stress in Swedish, French and English. JPh 19. 351–365.Google Scholar
Fry, D. B. (1955). Duration and intensity as physical correlates of linguistic stress. JASA 27. 765–768.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Matthew (2002). A phonetically driven account of syllable weight. Lg 78. 51–80.Google Scholar
Halle, Morris & Vergnaud, Jean-Roger (1987). Stress and the cycle. LI 18. 45–84.Google Scholar
Hammond, Michael (1999). The phonology of English: a prosodic optimality-theoretic approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hansen, Doris (1995). A study of the effect of the acculturation model on second language acquisition. In Eckman, Fred R., Highland, Diane, Lee, Peter W., Milcham, Jean & Weber, Rita Rutkowski (eds.) Second language acquisition theory and pedagogy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 305–316.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1982). Extrametricality and English stress. LI 13. 227–276.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce (1995). Metrical stress theory: principles and case studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hayes-Harb, Rachel, Nicol, Janet & Barker, Jason (2010). Learning the phonological forms of new words: effects of orthographic and auditory input. Language and Speech 53. 367–381.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Healy, Alice F. & Levitt, Andrea G. (1980). Accessibility of the voicing distinction for learning phonological rules. Memory and Cognition 8. 107–114.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Helimski, Eugene (1998). Nganasan. In Abondolo, Daniel (ed.) The Uralic languages. London & New York: Routledge. 480–515.Google Scholar
Hubbard, Timothy L. (2010). Auditory imagery: empirical findings. Psychological Bulletin 136. 302–329.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hudson Kam, Carla L. & Newport, Elissa L. (2005). Regularizing unpredictable variation: the roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language Learning and Development 1. 151–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson Kam, Carla L. & Newport, Elissa L. (2009). Getting it right by getting it wrong: when learners change languages. Cognitive Psychology 59. 30–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Itkonen, E. (1955). Über die Betonungsverhältnisse in den finnisch-ugrischen Sprachen. Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 5. 21–34.Google Scholar
Jassem, Wiktor, Morton, John & Steffen-Batog, Maria (1968). The perception of stress in synthetic speech-like stimuli by Polish listeners. In Jassem, Wiktor (ed.) Speech analysis and synthesis. Vol. 1. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. 289–308.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto (1904). Lehrbuch der Phonetik. Leipzig & Berlin: Teubner.Google Scholar
Kager, René (1989). A metrical theory of stress and destressing in English and Dutch. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael (1994). Sonority-driven stress. Ms, MIT. Available as ROA-33 from the Rutgers Optimality Archive.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul (1979). Metrical structure assignment is cyclic. LI 10. 421–441.Google Scholar
Krause, Scott (1980). Topics in Chukchee phonology and morphology. PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter (2003). Phonetic data analysis: an introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques. Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2002). A thematic guide to Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. (2003). OT constraints are categorical. Phonology 20. 75–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan (1993). Generalized alignment. Yearbook of Morphology 1993. 79–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan (1995). Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. In Beckman, Jill N., Dickey, Laura Walsh & Urbanczyk, Suzanne (eds.) Papers in Optimality Theory. Amherst: GLSA. 249–384.Google Scholar
Mairs, Jane Lowenstein (1989). Stress assignment in interlanguage phonology. In Gass, Susan M. & Schachter, Jacquelyn (eds.) Linguistic perspectives on second language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 260–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Pierre (2002). Le système vocalique du français du Québec: de l'acoustique à la phonologie. La linguistique 38:2. 71–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maurer, Daphne (1985). Infants' perception of facedness. In Field, Tiffany M. & Nathan Fox, Y. (eds.) Social perception in infants. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 73–100.Google Scholar
Maye, Jessica, Werker, Janet F. & Gerken, LouAnn (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognition 82. B101–B111.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mintz, Toben H. (2002). Category induction from distributional cues in an artificial language. Memory and Cognition 30. 678–686.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moreton, Elliott (2008). Analytic bias and phonological typology. Phonology 25. 83–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ohala, John J. (2005). Phonetic explanations for sound patterns: implications for grammars of competence. In Hardcastle, William J. & Beck, Janet Mackenzie (eds.) A figure of speech: a Festschrift for John Laver. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 23–38.Google Scholar
Olson, Linda L. & Samuels, S. Jay (1973). The relationship between age and accuracy of foreign language pronunciation. Journal of Educational Research 66. 263–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onishi, Kristine H., Chambers, Kyle E. & Fisher, Cynthia (2002). Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience. Cognition 83. B13–B23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paradis, Claude & Deshaies, Denise (1990). Rules of stress assignment in Québec French. Language Variation and Change 2. 135–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Joe (1992). The acquisition of parameters for word stress by French learners of English. Ms, Concordia University.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (1997). Metrical parameter missetting in second language acquisition. In Hannahs, S. J. & Young-Scholten, Martha (eds.) Focus on phonological acquisition. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. 235–261.Google Scholar
Pater, Joe (2000). Non-uniformity in English secondary stress: the role of ranked and lexically specific constraints. Phonology 17. 237–274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Joe & Tessier, Anne-Michelle (2005). Phonotactics and alternations: testing the connection with artificial language learning. In Flack, Katherine & Kawahara, Shigeto (eds.) UMOP 31: Papers in experimental phonetics and phonology. Amherst: GLSA. 1–16.Google Scholar
Payne, Judith (1990). Asheninca stress patterns. In Payne, Doris L. (ed.) Amazonian linguistics: studies in lowland South American languages. Austin: University of Texas Press. 185–209.Google Scholar
Peperkamp, Sharon & Dupoux, Emmanuel (2002). A typological study of stress ‘deafness’. In Gussenhoven, Carlos & Warner, Natasha (eds.) Laboratory Phonology 7. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 203–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peperkamp, Sharon & Dupoux, Emmanuel (2007). Learning the mapping from surface to underlying representations in an artificial language. In Cole, Jennifer & Hualde, Jose Ignacio (eds.) Laboratory Phonology 9. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 315–338.Google Scholar
Peperkamp, Sharon, Dupoux, Emmanuel & Sebastián-Gallés, Núria (1999). Perception of stress by French, Spanish and bilingual subjects. Paper presented at 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech), Aalborg.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peperkamp, Sharon, Skoruppa, Katrin & Dupoux, Emmanuel (2006). The role of phonetic naturalness in phonological rule acquisition. In Bamman, David, Magnitskaia, Tatiana & Zaller, Colleen (eds.) Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville: Cascadilla. 464–475.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven (1994). The language instinct. New York: William Morrow.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul (1993). Optimality Theory: constraint interaction in generative grammar. Ms, Rutgers University & University of Colorado, Boulder. Published 2004, Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Pycha, Anne, Nowak, Pawel, Shin, Eurie & Shosted, Ryan (2003). Phonological rule-learning and its implications for a theory of vowel harmony. WCCFL 22. 423–435.Google Scholar
Rice, Curt (1996). Apparent exceptional penultimate stress in English. Nordlyd 24. 157–167.Google Scholar
Saffran, Jenny R., Aslin, Richard N. & Newport, Elissa L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 274. 1926–1928.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saffran, Jenny R. & Thiessen, Erik D. (2003). Pattern induction by infant language learners. Developmental Psychology 39. 484–494.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schane, Sanford A. (1968). French phonology and morphology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Schane, Sanford A., Tranel, Bernard & Lane, Harlan (1974). On the psychological reality of a natural rule of syllable structure. Cognition 3. 351–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sievers, Eduard (1881). Grundzüge der Phonetik. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.Google Scholar
Smith, Jennifer L. (2002). Phonological augmentation in prominent positions. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Snow, Catherine E. & Hoefnagel-Höhle, Marian (1982). The Critical Period for language acquisition: evidence from second language learning. In Krashen, Stephen, Scarcella, Robin & Long, Michael (eds.) Child–adult differences in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. 93–111.Google Scholar
Stampe, David (1979). A dissertation on Natural Phonology. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Tesar, Bruce & Smolensky, Paul (1998). Learnability in Optimality Theory. LI 29. 229–268.Google Scholar
Tesar, Bruce & Smolensky, Paul (2000). Learnability in Optimality Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorn, Annabel S. C. & Gathercole, Susan E. (2001). Language differences in verbal short-term memory do not exclusively originate in the process of subvocal rehearsal. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 8. 357–364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tranel, Bernard (1987). The sounds of French: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaux, Bert (1998). The phonology of Armenian. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Douglas (2001). French sound structure. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.Google Scholar
Watson, C. S. (1973). Psychophysics. In Wolman, Benjamin B. (ed.) Handbook of general psychology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. 275–306.Google Scholar
Wilson, Colin (2003). Experimental investigation of phonological naturalness. WCCFL 22. 533–546.Google Scholar
Wilson, Colin (2006). Learning phonology with substantive bias: an experimental and computational study of velar palatalization. Cognitive Science 30. 945–982.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wolters, Gezinus, Kempen, Hanneke van & Wijlhuizen, Gert-Jan (1987). Quantification of small numbers of dots: subitizing or pattern recognition? The American Journal of Psychology 100. 225–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yallop, Colin (1977). Alyawarra: an Aboriginal language of Central Australia. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.Google Scholar
Zhang, Jie & Lai, Yuwen (2010). Testing the role of phonetic knowledge in Mandarin tone sandhi. Phonology 27. 153–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuraw, Kie (2007). The role of phonetic knowledge in phonological patterning: corpus and survey evidence from Tagalog infixation. Lg 83. 277–316.Google Scholar