Abstract
In this chapter, I address two major questions. First is whether a pattern that is predicted by this implicational universal is easier to learn than one that is not. The second question concerns how to determine which grammar is learned better.
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- 1.
The literature with respect to nasalization only discusses whether oral vowels and nasal vowels would tend to be grouped into the same category based on differences in vowel height (e.g., Wang 2001), investigates prosodic boundaries in nasality (e.g., Pan 2007), examines historical changes in nasalization (e.g., Lien 2000), and looks at how nasalization influences native Min speakers to learn English coda nasals (e.g., Hsu 2009), etc. But nothing is found having to do with the sonority hierarchy for consonants.
- 2.
The participants in my study were familiar with the concept of plurality and they were also explained what singular and plural meant by using Mandarin and English words as examples before they began the experiment.
- 3.
In Lin (2010), monosyllables were recorded by a native female S. Min speaker naive to the goal of experiments using Praat recording through a desk-mounted microphone. The tonal value of the monosyllables was set to 207 Hz using Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2008), and then syllables were concatenated to form tri-syllabic artificial words. In addition to the main experiments, Lin (2010) ran a pilot of six participants to confirm that 207 Hz produced by a native S. Min female speaker was recognized better than 407, 307, 107 Hz in a perceptual judgment task: oral and nasal monosyllables with one of the four tonal values were randomized, and participants heard one monosyllable at a time and were asked to judge whether it was nasalized. The correct rate was the highest for 207 Hz than the others. However, since participants recruited for Lin (2010) claimed that the manipulation of tonal values made oral sounds sound like nasalized sounds and unnatural, in the current experiment I did not manipulate tonal values. The silence intervals 100 and 150 ms for the current study were set by praat scripting.
- 4.
The boundaries were marked by hand, so there is a possibility that some intersyllable boundaries were slightly longer.
- 5.
Lin (2010) points out two concerns. One is that the silence between syllables might sound like plosives to Min speakers, so every item would have blockers everywhere. If so, whatever people are learning, they would not be the learning the patterns that Walker (2000) addresses. However the silence of the stimuli did not sound like plosives to two trained linguists. Another concern is that with silence, the stimulus might sound like three words, not one. However, the stimulus sounded more like one three-syllable word pronounced very slowly. This is good for my purposes, since the listeners can be sure that nasal harmony is not mere coarticulation. Hence, if participants learn any patterns, they might be like the patterns Walker identifies. Following Lin (2010, 2012), I used a strategy to ensure that participants would treat three-syllable words as one word rather than two or three: Participants were informed that they would hear one trisyllabic word at a time.
- 6.
The repetition of exposure items was reduced from four and eight times to three and six times based on the report of participants in the pilots that four and eight repetitions made them lose their focus and feel too tired to find a rule conditioning the plural change.
- 7.
Four completely random coin flips (of a fair coin) will on average come up with 3 or more heads (“successes”) 31.25% of the time. A caveat is that in many instances seeing 3-out-of-4 correct results for a particular pair could very easily reflect pure chance (random guessing) on the participant’s part. The design of the pilot experiment only used the same item once, which means a 1-out-of-1 correct results for a particular item will on average come up with 1 head (“success”) 50% of the time. The reduction of pure guessing from 50 to 31.25% is still an improvement. Ideally, it would be better to use 10 repetitions instead of 4. However, given that Experiment 2 only included 14 test pairs, 4 repetitions had already reached the maximal number of repetitions my participants could accept. My participants reported that they felt like the same items kept appearing, and started to wonder why the experiment had not come to an end.
- 8.
“Nasalized” is a common concept for Taiwanese people (/pʰĩ33-im55/ ‘nasalized sounds’), so there is no difficulty in addressing this term directly.
- 9.
Participants were allowed to adjust the volume, but nobody did.
- 10.
This emphasis was not given in pilot experiments of Lin (2016b). The emphasis to encourage participants to try to make a judgment even though certain sounds did not appear in the exposure is crucial, since the pilot studies (13 pilots in total, failure of passing the post-test: 3 participants) indicated that participants would refuse to make a judgment when faced with any new sounds.
- 11.
The implicational nasalized segment hierarchy hypothesis formed the initial motivation for this work, but natural classes turned out to be important as well. See discussion in Sect. 4.8.2.
- 12.
- 13.
The subtypes of categorization learners are not predicted to show different patterning for the old-same class items, but they would be distinguished once new-same class and new-gen items are taken into account. For the purpose of clarity, I illustrate the old-same class first, followed by the others.
- 14.
In Min, /w/ seems to pattern with labials phonologically. There is a labial co-occurrence restriction that two labials are not allowed within a constituent (two labials are under nucleus node: */uo/, */uau/) or are not allowed to “be dominated by a common node and one labial is immediately dominated by one and only one node which does not dominate the other labial” (Bao 2000: 110) (nucleus node for */tup/, */uap/); rhyme node for */pam/). Other than that, two labials are allowed (/pu/, /pau/).
- 15.
Two additional strategies that learners might use but are not relevant to this research are presented in this footnote. First, any new segments should be targets, and /k/ was just an exception. These learners had the impression that the main difference between singulars and plurals was nasalization, making them more inclined to treat new segments as targets. Since targets had changes (nasalization), but blockers did not (no nasalization), nasalization was the preferred strategy. For example, during a post-interview, subject 2 reported that /k/ was the only consonant that would block nasal spreading. Other consonants including new consonants should pattern together in allowing harmony in the same way: Stop nasalizing when encountering /k/, otherwise nasalize. Subject 11 treated /k/ as an exception, and other new consonants as targets (since /k/ was the only special consonant that could block spreading). Subject 12 thought that /s/ was a “new” segment and therefore a target (i.e., any “new” consonant should be treated as a target). This has nothing to do with the implicational relationship between an old target /w/ and a new segment /s/. Second, I suspect that learners could simply use a strategy that /w/ or /s/ should be a target, since the majority of new segments obey this trend (i.e., the majority of items had both a target and a blocker, so participants assumed that a new consonant needed to be a target when combined with a blocker).
- 16.
These represent two possibilities of game strategies. It could be that participants use other types of game strategies.
- 17.
Note that subject 25 was a generalizer for the first block of learning, but was an opposite generalizer for the other three blocks.
- 18.
/s/ and /t/ share the same place of articulation ([coronal]).
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Lin, YL. (2019). Experiment 1. In: Substantive Bias and Natural Classes. Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3534-1_4
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