Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T22:45:57.687Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

IMPLICIT LEARNING OF LATIN STRESS REGULARITIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2016

Calbert R. Graham  and
John N. Williams
Calbert R. Graham*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge, UK
John N. Williams
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge, UK
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Calbert R. Graham, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP, UK. E-mail: crg29@cam.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examines whether Japanese native (L1) listeners can implicitly learn stress pattern regularities, not present in their L1, after a brief auditory exposure. In the exposure phase, the participants listened to and repeated words bearing stress patterned after Latin, but with a highly restricted consonant inventory. They performed a judgment task designed to test whether they had learned the relevant stress pattern regularities from the brief listening experience. We assessed participants’ awareness of the inherent stress regularities by analyzing confidence in making decisions and by verbal report. Results suggest that although participants remained unaware of the underlying stress regularities they performed significantly above chance in endorsing correctly stressed novel items even when they claimed to be guessing. In addition, there was no difference in confidence between correct and incorrect judgments. These results suggest that brief exposure resulted in implicit knowledge of abstract stress assignment rules. However, participants rejected correctly stressed words that contained consonants that were not present in the test phase. On the basis of this finding, we speculate that in the acquisition of second language phonology, a violation at the segmental level may be deemed more costly than a violation in the prosodic domain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 3 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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.)

Footnotes

We would like to thank Brechtje Post and Meg Zellers for their feedback on the design of this study. We are also grateful to Bill VanPatten and the anonymous reviewers for extensive comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. The first author gratefully acknowledges research funding for this project from the St. John’s College (University of Cambridge) Research Scholars’ Support Fund.

References

REFERENCES

Allen, W. (1973). Accent and rhythm. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Altmann, G., Dienes, Z., & Goode, A. (1995). Modality independence of implicitly learned grammatical knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 21, 899–912.Google Scholar
Archibald, J. (1997). The acquisition of English stress by speakers of nonaccentual languages: Lexical storage versus computation of stress. Linguistics, 35, 167–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, E., & Conway, R. (1907). The restored pronunciation of Greek and Latin. Cambridge, UK: The University Press.Google Scholar
Beckman, M. (1986). Stress and non-stress accent (Netherlands Phonetics Archives, Vol. VII). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris Publications.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, M., & Pierrehumbert, J. (1986). Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, A. (1977). Accent placement and perception of prominence in rhythmic structures. In Hyman, L. (Ed.), Studies in stress and accent: Southern California occasional papers in linguistics (Vol. 4, pp. 1–13). Los Angeles: Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Berry, D. (Ed.). (1997). How implicit is implicit learning? Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boula de Mareüil, P., & Vieru-Dimulescu, B. (2006). The contribution of prosody to the perception of foreign accent. Phonetica, 63, 247–267.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chan, C. (1992). Implicit cognitive processes: Theoretical issues and applications in computer systems design (Unpublished doctoral thesis). Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Chan, R., & Leung, J. (2014). Implicit learning of L2 word stress regularities. Second Language Research, 30, 463–484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheesman, J., & Merikle, P. (1984). Priming with and without awareness. Perception and Psychophysics, 36, 387–395.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1988). The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 113–121.Google Scholar
Dell, G., Reed, K., Adams, D., & Meyer, A. (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, 1355–1366.Google ScholarPubMed
Dienes, Z., & Altmann, G. (1997). Transfer of implicit knowledge across domains: How implicit and how abstract? In Berry, D. (Ed.), How implicit is implicit learning? (pp. 107–123). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, N. (Ed.). (1994). Implicit and explicit learning of languages. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Goldrick, M. (2004). Phonological features in phonotactic constraints in speech production. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 586–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, C. (2014). F0 range in Japanese and English: The case of simultaneous bilinguals. Phonetica, 71, 271–295.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hamrick, P., & Rebuschat, P. (2012). How implicit is statistical learning? In Rebuschat, P. & Williams, J. (Eds.), Statistical learning and language acquisition (pp. 365–382). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hyde, T. S., & Jenkins, J. J. (1969). Differential effects of incidental tasks on the organization of recall of a list of highly associated words. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 83, 472–481.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakobson, R. (1931). Die Betonung und ihre Rolle in der Wortund Syntagma-Phonologie. In Roman Jakobson, selected writings I (pp. 117–136). The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Jilka, M. (2000). The contribution of intonation to the perception of foreign accent. Identifying intonational deviations by means of F0 generation and resynthesis (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Stuttgart.Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. (2013). Consonant Inventories. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/1, Accessed on 2015-08-29.)Google Scholar
Mester, A. (1994). The quantitative trochee in Latin. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 12, 1–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munro, M., & Derwing, T. (1999). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning, 49, 285–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onishi, K., Chambers, K., & Fisher, C. (2002). Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience. Cognition, 83, B13–B23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paciorek, A., & Williams, J. (2015). Semantic generalization in implicit language learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 41, 989–1002.Google ScholarPubMed
Pacton, S., Perruchet, P., Fayol, M., & Cleeremans, A. (2001). Implicit learning out of the lab: The case of orthographic regularities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 401–426.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peperkamp, S., & Dupoux, E. (2002). A typological study of stress “deafness.” In Gussenhoven, C. & Warner, N. (Eds.), Laboratory phonology (pp. 203–240). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J., & Beckman, M. (1988). Japanese tone structure. Linguistic Inquiry monographs (No. 15). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Reber, A. (1967). Implicit learning of artificial grammars. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 6, 855–863.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rebuschat, P. (2008). Implicit learning of natural language syntax (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Rebuschat, P. (2013). Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge in second language research. Language Learning, 63, 595–626.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rebuschat, P., & Williams, J. (2006). Dissociating implicit and explicit learning of syntactic rules. In Sun, R. (Ed.), Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 2594). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Rebuschat, P., & Williams, J. (2009). Implicit learning of word order. In Taatgen, N. & van Rijn, H. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 425–430). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
Rebuschat, P., & Williams, J. (2012). Implicit and explicit knowledge in second language acquisition. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33, 829–856.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tunney, R., & Altmann, G. (2001). Two modes of transfer in artificial grammar learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 614–639.Google ScholarPubMed
Ulbrich, C., & Mennen, I. (2015). When prosody kicks in: The intricate interplay between segments and prosody in perceptions of foreign accent. International Journal of Bilingualism. doi:10.1177/1367006915572383Google Scholar
Venditti, J. (2005). The J ToBI model of Japanese intonation. In Jun, S.-A. (Ed.), Prosodic typology: The phonology of intonation and phrasing (pp. 172–200). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, J., & Dell, G. S. (2006). Speech errors reflect newly learned phonotactic constraints. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 387–398.Google Scholar
Williams, J. (2009). Implicit learning in second language acquisition. In Ritchie, W. & Bhatia, T. (Eds.), The new handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 319–353). Bingley, UK: Emerald Press.Google Scholar