Language universals and misidentification: a two-way street.

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 medifinclude 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 medifinclude an e?). Results from five experiments show that, when participants attend to global phonological structure, ill-formed onsets are misidentified (e.g., mdif-->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.

Phonological universals in early childhood: Evidence from sonority restrictions.

Across languages, onsets with large sonority distances are preferred to those with smaller distances (e.g., bw>bd>lb; Greenberg, 1978). Optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky, 2004) attributes such facts to grammatical restrictions that are universally active in all grammars. To test this hypothesis, here, we examine whether children extend putatively universal sonority restrictions to onsets unattested in their language. Participants (M=4;04 years) were presented with pairs of auditory words-either identical (e.g., lbif→lbif) or epenthetically related (e.g., lbif→lebif)-and asked to judge their identity. Results showed that, like adults, children's ability to detect epenthetic distortions was monotonically related to sonority distance (bw>bd>lb), and their performance was inexplicable by several statistical and phonetic factors. These findings suggest that sonority restrictions are active in early childhood and their scope is broad.

Phonological universals constrain the processing of nonspeech stimuli.

Domain-specific systems are hypothetically specialized with respect to the outputs they compute and the inputs they allow (Fodor, 1983). Here, we examine whether these 2 conditions for specialization are dissociable. An initial experiment suggests that English speakers could extend a putatively universal phonological restriction to inputs identified as nonspeech. A subsequent comparison of English and Russian participants indicates that the processing of nonspeech inputs is modulated by linguistic experience. Striking, qualitative differences between English and Russian participants suggest that they rely on linguistic principles, both universal and language-particular, rather than generic auditory processing strategies. Thus, the computation of idiosyncratic linguistic outputs is apparently not restricted to speech inputs. This conclusion presents various challenges to both domain-specific and domain-general accounts of cognition.

Universal constraints on the sound structure of language: phonological or acoustic?

Languages are known to exhibit universal restrictions on sound structure. The source of such restrictions, however, is contentious: Do they reflect abstract phonological knowledge, or properties of linguistic experience and auditory perception? We address this question by investigating the restrictions on onset structure. Across languages, onsets of small sonority distances are dispreferred (e.g., lb is dispreferred to bn). Previous research with aural materials demonstrates such preferences modulate the perception of unattested onsets by English speakers: Universally ill-formed onsets are systematically misperceived (e.g., lba --> leba) relative to well-formed onsets (e.g., bn). Here, we show that the difficulty to process universally ill-formed onsets extends to printed materials. Auxiliary tests indicate that such difficulties reflect phonological, rather than orthographic knowledge, and regression analyses demonstrate such knowledge goes beyond the statistical properties of the lexicon. These findings suggest that speakers have abstract, possibly universal, phonological knowledge that is general with respect to input modality.

Listeners' knowledge of phonological universals: Evidence from nasal clusters.

Optimality Theory explains typological markedness implications by proposing that all speakers possess universal constraints penalizing marked structure, irrespective of the evidence provided by their language (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). An account of phonological perception sketched here entails that markedness constraints reveal their presence by inducing perceptual 'repairs' to structures ungrammatical in the hearer's language. As onset clusters of falling sonority are typologically marked relative to those of rising sonority (Greenberg, 1978), we examine English speakers' perception of nasal-initial clusters-lacking in English. We find greater accuracy for rising-sonority clusters, evidencing knowledge of markedness constraints favoring such onset clusters. The misperception of sonority falls cannot be accounted for by stimulus artifacts (the materials are perceived accurately by speakers of Russian-a language allowing nasal-initial clusters) nor by phonetic failure (English speakers misperceive falls even with printed materials) nor by putative relations of such onsets to the statistics of the English lexicon.

Language universals in human brains.

Do speakers know universal restrictions on linguistic elements that are absent from their language? We report an experimental test of this question. Our case study concerns the universal restrictions on initial consonant sequences, onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, certain onset clusters (e.g., lb) are dispreferred (e.g., systematically under-represented) relative to others (e.g., bl). We demonstrate such preferences among Korean speakers, whose language lacks initial C(1)C(2) clusters altogether. Our demonstration exploits speakers' well known tendency to misperceive ill-formed clusters. We show that universally dispreferred onset clusters are more frequently misperceived than universally preferred ones, indicating that Korean speakers consider the former cluster-type more ill-formed. The misperception of universally ill-formed clusters is unlikely to be due to a simple auditory failure. Likewise, the aversion of universally dispreferred onsets by Korean speakers is not explained by English proficiency or by several phonetic and phonological properties of Korean. We conclude that language universals are neither relics of language change nor are they artifacts of generic limitations on auditory perception and motor control-they reflect universal linguistic knowledge, active in speakers' brains.

What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions.

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd>lb). We demonstrate that such preferences modulate the perception of unattested onsets by English speakers: Monosyllabic auditory nonwords with onsets that are universally dispreferred (e.g., lbif) are more likely to be classified as disyllabic and misperceived as identical to their disyllabic counterparts (e.g., lebif) compared to onsets that are relatively preferred across languages (e.g., bdif). Consequently, dispreferred onsets benefit from priming by their epenthetic counterpart (e.g., lebif-lbif) as much as they benefit from identity priming (e.g., lbif-lbif). A similar pattern of misperception (e.g., lbif-->lebif) was observed among speakers of Russian, where clusters of this type occur. But unlike English speakers, Russian speakers perceived these clusters accurately on most trials, suggesting that the perceptual illusions of English speakers are partly due to their linguistic experience, rather than phonetic confusion alone. Further evidence against a purely phonetic explanation for our results is offered by the capacity of English speakers to perceive such onsets accurately under conditions that encourage precise phonetic encoding. The perceptual illusions of English speakers are also irreducible to several statistical properties of the English lexicon. The systematic misperception of universally dispreferred onsets might reflect their ill-formedness in the grammars of all speakers, irrespective of linguistic experience. Such universal grammatical preferences implicate constraints on language learning.