Structural Principles or Frequency of Use? An ERP Experiment on the Learnability of Consonant Clusters

Abstract

Phonological knowledge of a language involves knowledge about which segments can be combined under what conditions. Languages vary in the quantity and quality of licensed combinations, in particular sequences of consonants, with Polish being a language with a large inventory of such combinations. The present paper reports on a two-session experiment in which Polish-speaking adult participants learned nonce words with final consonant clusters. The aim was to study the role of two factors which potentially play a role in the learning of phonotactic structures: the phonological principle of sonority (ordering sound segments within the syllable according to their inherent loudness) and the (non-) existence as a usage-based phenomenon. EEG responses in two different time windows (adversely to behavioral responses) show linguistic processing by native speakers of Polish to be sensitive to both distinctions, in spite of the fact that Polish is rich in sonority-violating clusters. In particular, a general learning effect in terms of an N400 effect was found which was demonstrated to be different for sonority-obeying clusters than for sonority-violating clusters. Furthermore, significant interactions of formedness and session, and of existence and session, demonstrate that both factors, the sonority principle and the frequency pattern, play a role in the learning process.

The Sense of Sounds: Brain Responses to Phonotactic Frequency, Phonological Grammar and Lexical Meaning

“…The N400 shows increased amplitude when the integration of word meaning in a given context is more problematic, such as when a semantically incongruent word is placed within a sentence (e.g., “The pizza was too hot to cry ” vs. “The pizza was too hot to eat ”). The N400 for words may be experimentally elicited in sentence context, as in the previous example (e.g., Van den Brink and Hagoort, 2004; Laszlo and Federmeier, 2009; Brunellière and Soto-Faraco, 2015; Payne et al, 2015), or by priming techniques (e.g., Holcomb and Neville, 1990; Desroches et al, 2009; Robson et al, 2017; Wiese et al, 2017; Haebig et al, 2018). These techniques use a prime word or a prime picture followed by the target word, with prime-target pairs being either semantically congruent or incongruent.…”

“…A few studies have addressed both phonological grammaticality and lexicality by combining illegal sequences, pseudowords and words – the latter congruent and incongruent with the semantic context (Friedrich and Friederici, 2005; Becker et al, 2014; Gansonre et al, 2018), but phonotactic frequency has been left out from the comparison. Studies focusing on phonotactic frequency, on the other hand, have shown that it impacts learning (Gonzalez-Gomez et al, 2013), word likeness judgments (Bailey and Hahn, 2001), pseudoword repetition (Vitevitch and Luce, 1998, 1999, 2005), ERPs (Bonte et al, 2005, 2007; Hunter, 2013; Wiese et al, 2017), and the dynamics of brain connectivity (Gow and Olson, 2015). Moreover, several studies have focused on the processing of real words only (e.g., Payne et al, 2015), or on legal versus illegal sound combinations (e.g., Domahs et al, 2009; Rossi et al, 2011), and a detailed account of the interplay of phonological grammaticality, lexicality and phonotactic frequency during the time course of word processing has not yet been provided.…”

Sonority projection effect in French: A signal detection theory approach

“…The authors also investigated the interaction between well-formedness and the frequency of clusters in the lexicon using attested and unattested clusters. The results showed distinct but interacting responses to well-formedness and attestedness (see also Wiese, Orzechowska, Alday, & Ulbrich (2017) for a study of Polish). In a passive-listening EEG study in English, White and Chiu (2017) also observed distinct responses to the attestedness of CC onsets and their well-formedness.…”

Exponents of sonority in Slavic and Germanic languages

“…The role of sonority was also studied in ERP experiments. Electrophysiological responses to well-and ill-formed final clusters in Polish [27] and German [24] demonstrated the main effect of sonority in German speakers, and lowered sensitivity to sonority violations in Polish speakers. That is, the learning process at the neuro-physiological level is strongly affected by sonority in a phonotactically simpler language.…”