The Effect of Non-Linguistic Patterns on Linguistic Biases

The Effect of Non-Linguistic Patterns on Linguistic Biases Sara Finley (sara.finley@waldorf.edu) Department of Psychology, Waldorf College Forest City, IA, 50436, USA Abstract The present study explores the effects of non-linguistic experiences on biases for linguistic judgments, specifically consonant deletion patterns. When two adjacent consonants come into contact as a result of morphological concatenation, many languages will delete the first consonant (e.g., /bepdok/ becomes /bedok/). Speakers of these languages (as well as English speakers) prefer deletion of the first consonant to the second consonant because the first consonant is perceptually weaker, making it more prone to misrepresentations and modifications. Following exposure to a non-linguistic analogue of consonant deletion in which the second consonant was deleted instead of the first, participants no longer preferred deletion of the first consonant in the metalinguistic judgment task. These results suggest that exposure to non-linguistic materials can interact with linguistic judgments. Keywords: statistical learning, phonotactics, learning biases, analogy. Introduction One of the major questions in the cognitive science of language is how linguistic and non-linguistic experiences interact to build a productive system of language. For example, children learning language benefit from increased cognitive and social skills in their language capacities, but increased language capacities also help to scaffold cognitive and social growth (Dessalegen & Landau, 2008). Because language interacts with social, cultural and cognitive aspects of human functioning, it is important to understand how language influences non-linguistic cognition, in addition to how non-linguistic cognition influences language. The discussions concerning linguistic and non-linguistic interaction have often turned to the question of linguistic relativity, the idea that the specific language one speaks has an effect on how the speaker perceives and interacts with the world (Whorf, 1956). In addition, there is a question of how linguistic knowledge can aid in higher level cognition (Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003). The question of how language and thought interact can be addressed not only as whether language affects thought, but also whether non-linguistic information can have an effect on language. While language is a direct way to express one’s thoughts, there may be other, more subtle ways in which non-linguistic experience can affect language. These subtle effects could be used to understand the ways in which linguistic knowledge is specific to language (domain specific) and general to other cognitive processes (domain general). In domain specific views, language is believed to be a key component that to human cognition. The mechanisms that underlie language are separate from other species, and (in the most extreme theories) show no interaction with non-linguistic cognitive functions (Berent, 2012; Pinker & Jackendoff, 2009). In this view, non- linguistic cognition should have no influence on linguistic judgments. In a domain general view of language, foundations for the human language capacity arise through social and cultural transmission. The key to linguistic knowledge is an interaction between the need to communicate and the existence of high-level cognitive capacities such as abstract pattern learning and memory (Chater & Christiansen, 2010). Under this view, non- linguistic patterns should have a strong influence on linguistic constructs. One of the strong pieces of evidence for a domain specific approach to language is the idea that there are biases for specific linguistic structures that have no non-linguistic analogues (Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, & Vaknin, 2007; Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012; Finley, 2012; Finley & Badecker, 2008). For example, Finley (2012) found that adult native English speaker show a bias for phonological patterns based on vowel height. Since vowel height is a linguistic construct, it is hard to imagine how such a bias could be influenced by non-linguistic factors. Other evidence suggests that linguistic patterns may be stored as domain-general rules. Studies of statistical learning for speech segmentation showed similar results to linguistic and non-linguistic materials (Aslin, Saffran, & Newport, 1997; Saffran, Pollak, Seibel, & Shkolnik, 2007). In addition, Finley and Christiansen (2011) showed that adult learners can generalize a novel reduplication pattern to from non-linguistic materials to linguistic judgments. In addition, robust use of analogy in both linguistic and non-linguistic learning tasks (Gentner, 2010) opens the possibility that learners will be able to form connections between non-linguistic patterns and linguistic patterns. The evidence for both domain general and domain specific learning mechanisms suggests that grammatical principles have many influences. The goal of the present study is to provide experimental evidence that manipulation of nonlinguistic patterns can affect linguistic biases. Specifically, we focus on consonant deletion, a phonological pattern whereby a consonant will delete in the presence of two adjacent consonants. Biases in Consonant Deletions Consonant deletion is a phonological pattern in which one of two adjacent consonants delete (e.g., /depkot/ becomes