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The Obligatory Contour Principle in the perception of English
... This study examines the perceptual motivation behind dissimilation. Consistent with previous arguments suggesting that dissimilation originates from perception rather than production (Coetzee, 2005;Kiparsky, 2003; Scheer, 2013), we hypothesized that an oral stop with short of voice onset time (VOT) would be recognized as non-aspirated more often when it is followed by an aspirated stop with a long VOT. This hypothesis was tested through a perception experiment in which 32 Korean listeners made judgments on the first consonant of C 1 VC 2 V words manipulated with C 1 VOT and C 2 types. ...
... Indeed, Coetzee (2005) provides evidence for the psychological reality of dissimilation. 2 He observes the absence of /spVp/ and /skVk/ sequences in the English lexicon (while /stVt/ is present). To investigate this phenomenon, three sets of continua were developed for a perception experiment: While voice onset time (VOT) dissimilation could be identified in articulatory variation 3 , recent findings indicate it is not always the case that there is a phonetic precursor of dissimilation in the articulatory variation of repeated aspirated stops in Korean. ...
... Building on the previous arguments regarding the origin of dissimilation, we investigate the clues of VOT dissimilation in the perception of repeated aspirated stops in Korean. Similar to Coetzee's (2005) examination of the perceptual motivation of place-OCP in English, this study aims to illustrate how laryngeal dissimilation is driven, using aspirated stops in Korean. Additionally, while Coetzee's study explored the effect of the preceding consonant, we will focus on the impact of the following one. ...
... Furthermore, knowledge of this difference occurrences has also been observed by with native 20 speakers of Arabic, but they are hesitant to over-interpret the finding as their study 21 was not designed for this comparison. Hence, Hebrew (and possibly Arabic) 22 speakers seem to make a distinction between effects of OCP on identical versus 1 similar consonants. 2 Another study (Coetzee, 2005) investigated effects of OCP on English 3 listeners. In English, the co-occurrence of identical Cs in /sCVC/ syllables is strongly 4 restricted. ...
... However, the constraint only categorically bans co-occurrences of identical 5 labials and identical velars, while there are a few attestations of co-occurrences of 6 identical coronals (e.g., state). Coetzee (2005) found that when listening to /sCVC/ 7 syllables, in which one of the Cs was a hybrid sound between two places of 8 articulation, English listeners were generally more likely to perceive this hybrid as 9 non-identical with the second C, and this did not depend on whether the two Cs 10 would have resulted in identical coronals, velars or labials. As stimuli were controlled 11 for lexical statistics, Coetzee suggests that the results are indicative of abstract 12 knowledge of OCP in English listeners (Coetzee, 2005). ...
... Coetzee (2005) found that when listening to /sCVC/ 7 syllables, in which one of the Cs was a hybrid sound between two places of 8 articulation, English listeners were generally more likely to perceive this hybrid as 9 non-identical with the second C, and this did not depend on whether the two Cs 10 would have resulted in identical coronals, velars or labials. As stimuli were controlled 11 for lexical statistics, Coetzee suggests that the results are indicative of abstract 12 knowledge of OCP in English listeners (Coetzee, 2005). 13 This result is in contrast with studies on native listeners of Dutch, whose 14 knowledge of OCP-PLACE seems to be more detailed, as they use OCP-LABIAL but 15 not OCP-CORONAL for speech processing, as indicated by lexical decisions (Kager & 16 Shatzman, 2007) as well as speech segmentation preferences (Boll-Avetisyan & 17 Kager, 2014, henceforth B&K). ...
Highlights
• If OCP-Labial holds as a gradient constraint, specific labial pairs can be exempt.
• Dutch listeners know of such exceptions, which affect their processing of speech.
• Phonotactic knowledge influenced their segmentation of artificial languages.
• Detailed phonotactic knowledge affects processing when task demands are simple.
• Abstract phonotactic knowledge may affect processing when task demands are complex.
Abstract
Many languages restrict their lexicons by OCP-Place, a phonotactic constraint against co-occurrences of consonants with shared [place] (e.g., McCarthy, 1986). While many previous studies have suggested that listeners have knowledge of OCP-Place and use this for speech processing, it is less clear whether they make reference to an abstract representation of this constraint. In Dutch, OCP-Place gradiently restricts non-adjacent consonant co-occurrences in the lexicon. Focusing on labial-vowel-labial co-occurrences, we found that there are, however, exceptions from the general effect of OCP-Labial: (A) co-occurrences of identical labials are systematically less restricted than co-occurrences of homorganic labials, and (B) some specific pairs (e.g., /pVp/, /bVv/) occur more often than expected. Setting out to study whether exceptions such as (A) and (B) had an effect on processing, the current study presents an artificial language learning experiment and a reanalysis of Boll-Avetisyan and Kager's (2014) speech segmentation data. Results indicate that Dutch listeners can use both knowledge of phonotactic detail and an abstract constraint OCP-Labial as a cue for speech segmentation. We suggest that whether detailed or abstract representations are drawn on depends on the complexity of processing demands.
... Second, there might have been a problem with another aspect of the phonological structure of the pseudowords in the experiment, i.e. long-distance agreement of phonological features (Coetzee 2005(Coetzee , 2008. Such effects of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP: Coetzee 2005) might have arisen with pseudowords such as pleep (in which initial /p/ and final /p/ share all features) or glik (in which the initial and final sounds share the dorsal feature). ...
Previous research suggests that different types of word-final /s/ and /z/ (e.g. non-morphemic vs. plural or clitic morpheme) in English show realisational differences in duration. However, there is disagreement on the nature of these differences, as experimental studies have provided evidence for durational differences of the opposite direction as results from corpus studies (i.e. non-morphemic > plural > clitic /s/). The experimental study reported here focuses on four types of word-final /s/ in English, i.e. non-morphemic, plural, and is - and has -clitic /s/. We conducted a pseudoword production study with native speakers of Southern British English. The results show that non-morphemic /s/ is significantly longer than plural /s/, which in turn is longer than clitic /s/, while there is no durational difference between the two clitics. This aligns with previous corpus rather than experimental studies. Thus, the morphological category of a word-final /s/ appears to be a robust predictor for its phonetic realisation influencing speech production in such a way that systematic subphonemic differences arise. This finding calls for revisions of current models of speech production in which morphology plays no role in later stages of production.
... Furthermore, OCP-PLACE affects performance in lexical decision tasks: nonwords that violate OCP-PLACE are rejected faster than nonwords composed of consonants that do not share [place] by native listeners of Hebrew (Berent, Everett, & Shimron, 2001) and Dutch . Also, OCP-PLACE biases phoneme identification such that forms containing sequences that violate OCP-PLACE tend to be perceived as sequences of non-harmonic consonants by native listeners of English (Coetzee, 2005). These studies suggest a role for OCP-PLACE in processing. ...
OCP-PLACE, a cross-linguistically well-attested constraint against pairs of consonants with shared [place], is psychologically real. Studies have shown that the processing of words violating OCP-PLACE is inhibited. Functionalists assume that OCP arises as a consequence of low-level perception: a consonant following another with the same [place] cannot be faithfully perceived as an independent unit. If functionalist theories were correct, then lexical access would be inhibited if two homorganic consonants conjoin at word boundaries—a problem that can only be solved with lexical feedback.
Here, we experimentally challenge the functional account by showing that OCP-PLACE can be used as a speech segmentation cue during pre-lexical processing without lexical feedback, and that the use relates to distributions in the input.
In Experiment 1, native listeners of Dutch located word boundaries between two labials when segmenting an artificial language. This indicates a use of OCP-LABIAL as a segmentation cue, implying a full perception of both labials. Experiment 2 shows that segmentation performance cannot solely be explained by well-formedness intuitions. Experiment 3 shows that knowledge of OCP-PLACE depends on language-specific input: in Dutch, co-occurrences of labials are under-represented, but co-occurrences of coronals are not. Accordingly, Dutch listeners fail to use OCP-CORONAL for segmentation.
... We do not adopt this approach, preferring to let the models learn from all of the available data and imposing the penalty for lack of restrictiveness explicitly. Berkley 1994aBerkley , 2000 Buckley 1997; MacEachern 1999; Coetzee 2005 Coetzee , 2008 Kawahara et al. 2006McCarthy (1988McCarthy ( , 1994) links the restriction on identical place features to a more general restriction on co-occurrence of identical elements, the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP; Leben 1973; Goldsmith 1976; McCarthy 1979 McCarthy , 1981 McCarthy , 1986), therefore the constraint is generally referred to as OCP-Place. As already noted, we focus exclusively on OCP-Place effects in this paper, but anticipate that the main idea behind our proposal would readily generalized to OCP effects on other features borne by consonants (e.g., McCarthy 1988; Yip 1989; MacEachern 1999) and to identity or partial identity effects more generally (e.g., Ito 1984; McConvell 1988; Goodman 1992; Hyman 1995; Suzuki 1998; Hansson 2001; Rose and Walker 2004; see also FPB, pp. ...
Subsidiary features modulate the degree to which the Obligatory Contour Principle on place (OCP-Place) is violated by homorganic consonants. Statistical analysis of consonant co-occurrence patterns in four unrelated languages, combined with a method of model compar-ison that incorporates Occam's Razor, support a theory in which each place and subsidiary feature has a weight that contributes to gradient OCP-Place violation. Crucially, the weights of subsidiary features are not free to vary across place of articulation within a language. This weighted feature theory is more restrictive than the alternative proposed by Coetzee and Pater 2008b, which allows subsidiary features to vary in weight both across languages and across places within a language (an approach that has its roots in the non-quantitative theories of Yip 1989; Padgett 1991, 1995; McCarthy 1994). The weighted feature theory is less restrictive than the natural classes model of Frisch et al. 2004, but the greater descriptive freedom pro-vided by language-particular weighting is motivated by the data even when Occam's Razor is taken into account. In addition to arguing for a novel theory of subsidiary features, this paper demonstrates that the method of evaluating analyses of co-occurrence data with respect to Ob-served/Expected (O/E) values — as originally proposed by Pierrehumbert 1993 and adopted by several recent papers in NLLT (Frisch et al. 2004, Coetzee and Pater 2008b, Anttila 2008, Coon and Gallagher 2008) — is mathematically flawed, as it confounds co-occurrence restric-tions with positional probabilities. The main empirical claim of Coetzee and Pater 2008b, namely that correlations with the data of Arabic and Muna uniformly favor their weighted-constraint theory over that of Frisch et al. 2004, is based on the problematic O/E method and must be qualified. An alternative, statistically sound method of model evaluation and com-parison based on probability theory is introduced and shown to support the weighted feature theory of OCP-Place over the alternatives considered. the participants of the Linguistics colloquium at Yale and the the CLSP seminar at Johns Hopkins for helpful feedback. We are grateful to Andries Coetzee and Stefan Frisch for making data from Muna and Arabic available to us. Bruce Hayes deserves special acknowledgment for his role in the development of the grammatical frame-work that we adopt, as well as for making versions of the Shona and Wargamay data publicly accessible.
... Facing the same problem with regard to the Buckeye Corpus and CELEX, Raymond et al. (2006) showed that CELEX and Buckeye frequencies are highly correlated (r = 0.82). In fact, using CELEX for frequency counts, even when dealing with American English, is standard practice in the field (Albright 2009;Coetzee 2005Coetzee , 2008. We therefore follow the standard practice, using CELEX for frequency counts in our study. ...
In the past two decades, variation has received a lot of attention in mainstream generative phonology, and several different models have been developed to account for variable phonological phenomena. However, all existing generative models of phonological variation account for the overall rate at which some process applies in a corpus, and therefore implicitly assume that all words are affected equally by a variable process. In this paper, we show that this is not the case. Many variable phenomena are more likely to apply to frequent than to infrequent words. A model that accounts perfectly for the overall rate of application of some variable process therefore does not necessarily account very well for the actual application of the process to individual words. We illustrate this with two examples, English t/d-deletion and Japanese geminate devoicing. We then augment one existing generative model (noisy Harmonic Grammar) to incorporate the contribution of usage frequency to the application of variable processes. In this model, the influence of frequency is incorporated by scaling the weights of faithfulness constraints up or down for words of different frequencies. This augmented model accounts significantly better for variation than existing generative models.
... It is, therefore, unclear whether participants' judgments are really due to pure phonotactic constraints or reflect the influence of the similarity of the nonwords to existing words. The few studies that used on-line measures with auditory stimuli and reported effects of abstract phonotactic constraints (e.g., [5], [6]) also did not manage to deconfound abstract phonotactic constraints from lexical statistics. Thus, clear evidence for the involvement of abstract phonotactic constraints in speech perception remained so far unattested. ...
This study investigated whether abstract, gradient phonotactic constraints play a role in speech processing. Dutch listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task, in which the nonword stimuli either did or did not violate a phonotactic constraint. Listeners were faster to reject nonwords that violated a phonotactic constraint. This effect remained significant even after partialling out the effects of lexical factors, such as the similarity of the nonwords to existing words in the lexicon. This finding constitutes, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of the involvement of pure abstract phonotactic constraints in on-line speech perception.
... The second bias seems to be a perceptual bias and suggests that one of the repeated elements will be ignored. Indeed, the need to consider two consecutive identical elements together could constitute a violation of certain linguistic rules that stipulate that contrasts should define the contours of perceptual units (Coetzee, 2005; Kingston et al., 2006 ). Finally, the third bias is based on the distinction principle (Richards, 2006 ), which prohibits units of the same type from being too close together in a single linguistic sequence. ...
The literature on repetition processing reveals an intriguing paradox between the particular salience of repetitions, which makes them easy to learn, and a tendency to avoid them when generating sequences. The aim of this experiment was to study the extent to which children can learn to produce these avoided behaviours by means of an artificial grammar paradigm using generation tests with implicit or explicit instructions. The analysis of the control group's performance confirmed the presence of a spontaneous tendency to avoid generating repetitions. A comparison with chance revealed that the children learned to produce repetitions in the explicit test but not in the implicit test. However, a comparison with the control group showed that learning nonetheless occurred in the experimental group with the implicit test. The discussion focused on this antirepetition behavioural bias and how it interacted with the type of information processes elicited by the tests selected for assessing implicit learning effects.
... The fact that even a constraint of the *SPEP type can be part of a psychologically real grammar is all the more remarkable as this constraint banning German words of the type are still sensitive to the oddity or markedness of words that violate *SPEP. On this level, our findings are in accordance with results obtained in previous psycholinguistic studies (Berent et al., 1997;Berent et al., 2003;Coetzee, 2003). Moreover, using the ERP technique, the comparison between non-words and pseudo-words enables us to determine at which level of phonological (word) processing such a constraint comes into play. ...
How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC(i)VC(i)). We examined three types of monosyllabic late positive CCVC words: (a) existing words [see text], (b) wellformed novel words [see text] and component (c) illformed novel words [see text] as instances of Obligatory Contour Principle non-word (OCP) violations. Wellformed and illformed novel words evoked an N400 effect processing in comparison to existing words. In addition, illformed words produced an enhanced late posterior positivity effect compared to wellformed novel words. obligatory contour Our findings support the well-known observation that novel words evoke principle higher costs in lexical integration (reflected by N400 effects). Crucially, modulations of a late positive component (LPC) show that violations of phonological phonotactic constraints influence later stages of cognitive processing even constraints when stimuli have already been detected as non-existing. Thus, the comparison of electrophysiological effects evoked by the two types of non-existing words reveals the stages at which phonologically based structural wellformedness comes into play during word processing.
Three experiments are reported that collectively show that listeners perceive speech sounds as contrasting auditorily with neighboring sounds. Experiment 1 replicates the well-established finding that listeners categorize more of a [d-g] continuum as [g] after [l] than after [r]. Experiments 2 and 3 show that listeners discriminate stimuli in which the energy concentrations differ in frequency between the spectra of neighboring sounds better than those in which they do not differ. In Experiment 2, [alga-arda] pairs, in which the energy concentrations in the liquid-stop sequences are H(igh) L(ow)-LH, were more discriminable than [alda-arga] pairs, in which they are HH-LL. In Experiment 3, [da] and [ga] syllables were more easily discriminated when they were preceded by lower and higher pure tones, respectively-that is, tones that differed from the stops' higher and lower F3 onset frequencies-than when they were preceded by H and L pure tones with similar frequencies. These discrimination results show that contrast with the target's context exaggerates its perceived value when energy concentrations differ in frequency between the target's spectrum and its context's spectrum. Because contrast with its context does more that merely shift the criterion for categorizing the target, it cannot be produced by neural adaptation. The finding that nonspeech contexts exaggerate the perceived values of speech targets also rules out compensation for coarticulation by showing that their values depend on the proximal auditory qualities evoked by the stimuli's acoustic properties, rather than the distal articulatory gestures.
This paper presents evidence that speakers of Cochabamba Quechua are aware of non-local restrictions on ejectives in their language. A repetition task was run to investigate the synchronic status of two restrictions in Quechua: the co-occurrence restriction on ejectives, which prohibits roots with two ejectives (e.g., *[k’ap’i]), and the ordering restriction on ejectives, which prohibits roots with an initial plain stop and a medial ejective (e.g., *[kap’i]). Medial ejectives are generally attested in the language, but only occur in roots with an initial fricative or sonorant (e.g., [mat’i] ‘forehead’). Native Quechua speakers were asked to repeat a mixture of real and nonsense words with medial ejectives, where the nonsense words were either phonotactically legal but unattested roots or phonotactically illegal roots that violated either the co-occurrence restriction or the ordering restriction. Medial ejectives are accurately repeated significantly more often in nonce roots where the medial ejective is phonotactically legal than when it is illegal. There is variation among subjects as to whether accuracy differs greatly between the co-occurrence and ordering category targets. Additionally, there is variation in how roots that violate the ordering restriction are repaired: both de-ejectivization, e.g., target [kap’i] produced as [kapi], and movement of ejection, e.g., target [kap’i] produced as [k’api] are common. This variation in repair strategy has implications for the formal analysis of the restriction, which must predict all well-attested repairs.
The aim of this article is to show that synchronic cognitive constraints are responsible for some restrictions on human speech sound patterns; not all markedness asymmetries can be ascribed to mechanisms of diachronic change. We identify evidence for synchronic constraints in sound patterns that are desirable from a performance perspective yet are not attested. We also discuss recent experiments that provide evidence for psychologically and even neurophysiologically active restrictions; these patterns can be distinguished from statistical generalizations across the lexicon. We also argue that there is evidence that language learning is determined by innate predispositions. Finally, we examine the methodology behind choosing a synchronic or diachronic account for a particular sound pattern when both potentially offer an explanation.
In this article, I make two theoretical claims. (i) For some form to be grammatical in language L, it is not necessary that the form satisfy all constraints that are active in L; that is, even grammatical forms can violate constraints. (ii) There are degrees of ungrammaticality; that is, not all ungrammatical forms are equally ungrammatical. I first show that these claims follow straightforwardly from the basic architecture of an optimality-theoretic grammar. I then show that the surface sound patterns used most widely in formal phonology cannot be used to test the truth of these two claims, but argue that results from speech processing experiments can. Finally, I discuss three experiments on the processing of nonwords of the form [stVt], [skVk], and [spVp] in English that were designed to test these claims, and show that both claims are confirmed by the results of the experiments.*
Can second language (L2) learners acquire a grammar that allows a subset of the structures allowed by their native grammar? This question is addressed here with respect to acquisition of phonotactics. On the assumption that the L2 initial state equals the native grammar's final state, learnability theory would predict that a lack of negative evidence for phonotactic structures that are illegal in the target language precludes acquisition of the target grammar. This prediction is tested for L1-Russian (superset) and L1-Spanish (subset) L2 learners of Dutch by means of word-likeness judgments and lexical decision experiments. Participants responded to nonwords containing consonant clusters in onsets and codas that are legal (1) only in Russian, (2) only in Russian and Dutch, or (3) in all three languages. The results converge to show that advanced L1-Russian and L1-Spanish L2 learners possess native-like phonotactic knowledge. Analysis shows that this knowledge cannot be attributed to transfer of lexical statistics from the native language. The results suggest that L2 phonotactic acquisition is not affected by subset/superset relations between the native language and target language. Some possible explanations for our findings are discussed.
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