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Constraints on learning disjunctive, unidimensional auditory and phonetic categories

  • Christopher C. HeffnerEmail author
  • William J. Idsardi
  • Rochelle S. Newman
Perceptual/Cognitive Constraints on the Structure of Speech Communication: In Honor of Randy Diehl
First Online:

Abstract

Phonetic categories must be learned, but the processes that allow that learning to unfold are still under debate. The current study investigates constraints on the structure of categories that can be learned and whether these constraints are speech-specific. Category structure constraints are a key difference between theories of category learning, which can roughly be divided into instance-based learning (i.e., exemplar only) and abstractionist learning (i.e., at least partly rule-based or prototype-based) theories. Abstractionist theories can relatively easily accommodate constraints on the structure of categories that can be learned, whereas instance-based theories cannot easily include such constraints. The current study included three groups to investigate these possible constraints as well as their speech specificity: English speakers learning German speech categories, German speakers learning German speech categories, and English speakers learning musical instrument categories, with each group including participants who learned different sets of categories. Both speech groups had greater difficulty learning disjunctive categories (ones that require an “or” statement) than nondisjunctive categories, which suggests that instance-based learning alone is insufficient to explain the learning of the participants learning phonetic categories. This fact was true for both novices (English speakers) and experts (German speakers), which implies that expertise with the materials used cannot explain the patterns observed. However, the same was not true for the musical instrument categories, suggesting a degree of domain-specificity in these constraints that cannot be explained through recourse to expertise alone.

Keywords

Category learning Categorization Speech perception Phonetics 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship award and a University of Maryland, College Park Graduate School Flagship Fellowship, to C.C.H., as well as NSF IGERT Grant 0801465 (PI: C. Phillips), an NSF Linguistics Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant awarded to W.J.I. (co-PI: CCH), BCS 1650791, the Maryland Language Science Center, and the University of Maryland–University of Tübingen International Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching Collaboration. Data from this experiment will be available online, in line with the Open Science Framework, for participants who consented to sharing data. We thank Peter Deaville, Stephen DeVilbiss, Scott Kaplowitz, Priyanka Konanur, Zoe Schlueter, and the members of the UMD Language Development Lab for their help in running English-speaking participants for this project. We thank Andrea Weber’s lab at Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, for their space and support for the German-speaking participants, particularly Sara Beck, Ann-Kathrin Grohe, Lisa Kienzle, and Sarah Schwarz. Michael Key generously allowed us to use his German fricative stimuli for this study.

Many people have provided discussion and insightful comments during the development and publication process in this study. Among others, we would like to thank Ann Bradlow, Al Braun, Catherine Carr, Bharath Chandrasekaran, Jeff Chrabaszcz, Karthik Durvasula, Naomi Feldman, Drew Hendrickson, Lori Holt, Ellen Lau, Todd Maddox, Holger Mitterer, Emily Myers, Chris Neufeld, Rob Nosofsky, Janet Pierrehumbert, Eva Reinisch, Kirsten Smayda, and Joe Toscano. Jared Linck gave immensely useful statistical support. Portions of this research were presented at the eighty-eighth annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, travel to which was financed by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, at the sixth annual Michigan State Undergraduate Linguistics Conference (MSULC) in East Lansing, Michigan, travel to which was funded by the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages of Michigan State University, and at the Mini-Workshop on Phonetic Processing and Learning at Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

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© The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive ScienceUniversity of MarylandCollege ParkUSA
  2. 2.Department of LinguisticsUniversity of MarylandCollege ParkUSA
  3. 3.Department of Speech and Hearing SciencesUniversity of MarylandCollege ParkUSA
  4. 4.Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing SciencesUniversity of ConnecticutStorrsUSA

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