Speaker: Elliott Moreton (UNC) Title: Inside adult phonotactic learning Date: Friday, March 11th Time: 3:30-5:00 PM Place: 32-141
Lab studies of phonological learning by adults (“artificial-language” studies) have become common in recent years as a way to test hypotheses about phonological inductive biases. However, not much is at present known about what participants are actually doing in the experiments. Do all participants approach the task in the same way? How does the experimental procedure affect the participants’ approach? Does the participant’s approach affect which patterns are easier or harder to learn? In this talk, we will discuss results from a series of phonotactic pattern-learning experiments that address these questions using both objective measures (e.g., proportion correct, reaction time, abruptness of the learning curve, etc.) and subjective ones (analysis of participants’ introspective reports). The main conclusion is that in any of a range of experimental conditions, two sub-populations emerge: implicit (intuitive, cue-based) and explicit (rational, rule-based) learners, and that the two learning modes can differ in sensitivity to different patterns: Rule-seeking amplifies an advantage which family-resemblance patterns enjoy over exclusive-or patterns. The existence and experimental signatures of implicit and explicit learning modes are very similar to what has been found in non-linguistic pattern learning; however, the effect of rule-seeking on relative difficulty is quite different. Implications will be discussed for both phonological theory and for the relationship between phonological and non-phonological pattern learning.