Children typically produce high-frequency phonotactic sequences, such as the /st/ in “toaster,” more accurately than the lower frequency /mk/ in “tomcat.” This high-frequency advantage can be simulated experimentally with a statistical learning paradigm, and when 4-year-old children are familiarized with many examples of a sequence like /mk/, they generally produce it more accurately than if they are exposed to just a few examples. Here, we sought to expand our understanding of the high-frequency advantage, but surprisingly, we instead uncovered an exception. Twenty-nine children between 4 and 5 years of age completed a phonotactic statistical learning experiment, but they also completed a separate experiment focused on statistical learning of prosodic contours. The order of the experiments was randomized, with the phonotactic statistical learning experiment occurring first for half of the children. For the children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment first, the results were consistent with previous research and a high-frequency advantage. However, children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment second produced low-frequency sequences more accurately than high-frequency sequences. There is little precedent for the latter effect, but studies of multistream statistical learning may provide some context for unpacking and extending the result.

This study presents a micro-typological description of German dialects, focusing on the structure of 13,492 tokens of monosyllables, across 182 locations within Germany. Based on data from the Phonetischer Atlas der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, systematic geographical differences in both the segmental and prosodic organization of syllables are explored. The analysis reveals a North–South contrast in the organization of syllable structure. While the North tends toward more simple CVC syllables, the South tends toward the clustering of obstruents. An analysis of sonority dispersion reveals that in southern German, final demisyllables tend to follow more closely the sonority scale. Based on Markov chain models, the study reveals geographical differences in transition probabilities between the segments within monosyllables in German dialects.*

This paper describes a perception experiment with L1 Polish and L1 English listeners on the affrication of initial English /tr/ and /dr/ (TR) consonant clusters. The goal was to test phonological predictions formulated within the Onset Prominence (OP) framework. OP offers two distinct structural configurations for representing rising sonority onset clusters. One predicts synchronous cluster articulation in English, giving rise to affrication, while the other predicts asynchronous cluster articulation in Polish. Two groups of listeners performed a two-alternative forced choice identification task on stimuli that included affricated clusters, unaffricated clusters, affricates, and CəC-initial words. For L1 English listeners, the unaffricated cluster-initial items induced the slowest responses. For L1 Polish listeners, the lack of affrication facilitated cluster identification, while the CəC-initial words induced the slowed responses. The results suggest cross-language interaction by which Polish listeners equate L1 unaffricated clusters with L2 CəC-initial words, in accordance with the OP proposal.

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.

We examined full-term and preterm infants’ perception of frequent and infrequent phonotactic pairings involving sibilants and liquids. Infants were tested on their preference for syllables with onsets involving /s/ or /ʃ/ followed by /l/ or /r/ using the Headturn Preference Procedure. Full-term infants preferred the frequent to the infrequent phonotactic pairings at 9 months, but not at either younger or older ages. Evidence was inconclusive regarding a possible difference between full-term and preterm samples; however, limitations on the preterm sample size limited our power to detect differences. Preference for the frequent pairing was not related to later vocabulary development.

Most current models of nonnative speech perception (e.g., extended perceptual assimilation model, PAM-L2, Best & Tyler, 2007; speech learning model, Flege, 1995; native language magnet model, Kuhl, 1993) base their predictions on the native/nonnative status of individual phonetic/phonological segments. This paper demonstrates that the phonotactic properties of Japanese influence the perception of natively contrasting consonants and suggests that phonotactic influence must be formally incorporated in these models. We first propose that by extending the perceptual categories outlined in PAM-L2 to incorporate sequences of sounds, we can account for the effects of differences in native and nonnative phonotactics on nonnative and cross-language segmental perception. In addition, we test predictions based on such an extension in two perceptual experiments. In Experiment 1, Japanese listeners categorized and rated vowel–consonant–vowel strings in combinations that either obeyed or violated Japanese phonotactics. The participants categorized phonotactically illegal strings to the perceptually nearest (legal) categories. In Experiment 2, participants discriminated the same strings in AXB discrimination tests. Our results show that Japanese listeners are more accurate and have faster response times when discriminating between legal strings than between legal and illegal strings. These findings expose serious shortcomings in currently accepted nonnative perception models, which offer no framework for the influence of native language phonotactics.

Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory [e] preceding word-initial [s]-consonant sequences, e.g., perceiving [stið] as [estið] (Cuetos, Hallé, Domínguez & Segui, 2011), but this illusion is weaker for Spanish speakers who know English, which lacks the illusion (Carlson, Goldrick, Blasingame & Fink, 2016). The present study aimed to shed light on why this occurs by assessing how a brief interval spent using English impacts performance in Spanish auditory discrimination and lexical decision. Late Spanish–English bilinguals’ pattern of responses largely matched that of monolinguals, but their response times revealed significant differences between monolinguals and bilinguals, and between bilinguals who had just completed tasks in English vs. Spanish. These results suggest that late bilinguals do not simply learn to perceive initial [s]-consonant sequences veridically, but that elements of both their phonotactic systems interact dynamically during speech perception, as listeners work to identify what it was they just heard.

Word-initial /s/-consonant clusters do not occur in Spanish. Confronted with such sequences (e.g., in loanwords), Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory initial /e/, ‘repairing’ the illicit sequence. In two experiments, both conducted in Spanish with Spanish-sounding nonwords, we ask whether knowledge of English, which has no restriction against this sound sequence, weakens this pattern of perceptual repair in fluent Spanish–English bilinguals, and whether the effects of English depend on language dominance. In both identification and discrimination tasks, bilinguals exhibited weaker perceptual repair effects relative to Spanish monolinguals. This was true even for bilinguals dominant in Spanish, though the weakening was more pronounced for English-dominant bilinguals. These results show that conflicting phonotactic systems can jointly influence bilinguals’ perceptual repair of the acoustic signal in the more restrictive language, even when it is the bilingual's dominant language, suggesting a degree of integration and mutual influence of knowledge between both their languages.