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Abstract
Certain ill-formed phonological structures are systematically under-represented across languages and misidentified by human listeners. It is currently unclear whether this results from grammatical phonological knowledge that actively recodes ill-formed structures, or from difficulty with their phonetic encoding. To examine this question, we gauge the effect of two types of tasks on the identification of onset clusters that are unattested in an individual's language. One type calls attention to global phonological structure by eliciting a syllable count (e.g., does medif include one syllable or two?). A second set of tasks promotes attention to local phonetic detail by requiring the detection of specific segments (e.g., does medif include an e?). Results from five experiments show that, when participants attend to global phonological structure, ill-formed onsets are misidentified (e.g., mdif[arrow right]medif) relative to better-formed ones (e.g., mlif). In contrast, when people attend to local phonetic detail, they identify ill-formed onsets as well as better-formed ones, and they are highly sensitive to non-distinctive phonetic cues. These findings suggest that misidentifications reflect active recoding based on broad phonological knowledge, rather than passive failures to extract acoustic surface forms. Although the perceptual interface could shape such knowledge, the relationship between language and misidentification is a two-way street.
Keywords
loanword adaptation, misperception, onset, sonority, speech perception
Introduction
The link between the distribution of phonological structures across languages and their representation by individual speakers is a significant discovery of modern linguistics (Jakobson, 1968; Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). Typological research (Greenberg, 1978) shows that certain phonological structures (e.g., the syllable lba) are systematically under-represented relative to others (e.g., bla). Moreover, structures that are under-represented across languages are harder for individual speakers to identify (Blevins, 2004). Although the misidentification of ill-formed structures is most striking when the relevant structures are unattested in a speaker's language, misidentification is not simply due to unfamiliarity. Indeed, ill-formed structures are harder to process than better-formed ones even when both are unattested in one's language. Such structures are systematically misidentified in various experimental tasks (e.g., lba is misidentified as leba, Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, & Vaknin, 2007; see also Davidson, 2006; Moreton, 2002; Zuraw, 2007) and they are harder to learn (Becker, Ketrez, & Nevins, 2011; Moreton, 2008; Wilson, 2006). The convergence between the typological tendencies (Hyman, 2008) and...