Spoken language achieves robustness and evolvability by exploiting degeneracy and neutrality

B Winter - BioEssays, 2014‏ - Wiley Online Library
As with biological systems, spoken languages are strikingly robust against perturbations.
This paper shows that languages achieve robustness in a way that is highly similar to many …

Language universals at birth

DM Gómez, I Berent… - Proceedings of the …, 2014‏ - National Acad Sciences
The evolution of human languages is driven both by primitive biases present in the human
sensorimotor systems and by cultural transmission among speakers. However, whether the …

[HTML][HTML] Infants' develo** sensitivity to native language phonotactics: a meta-analysis

M Sundara, ZL Zhou, C Breiss, H Katsuda, J Steffman - Cognition, 2022‏ - Elsevier
We used Bayesian modeling to aggregate experiments investigating infants' sensitivity to
native language phonotactics. Our findings were based on data from 83 experiments on …

Statistical speech segmentation and word learning in parallel: Scaffolding from child-directed speech

D Yurovsky, C Yu, LB Smith - Frontiers in psychology, 2012‏ - frontiersin.org
In order to acquire their native languages, children must learn richly structured systems with
regularities at multiple levels. While structure at different levels could be learned serially, eg …

[HTML][HTML] Learning nonadjacent dependencies in phonology: Transparent vowels in vowel harmony

S Finley - Language, 2015‏ - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Nonadjacent dependencies are an important part of the structure of language. While the
majority of syntactic and phonological processes occur at a local domain, there are several …

Sounding out sonority

S Parker - Language and Linguistics Compass, 2017‏ - Wiley Online Library
This metastudy summarizes 264 recent experimental works involving sonority. The
discussion here centers around an accompanying appendix that lists several details of each …

The role of phonological structure in speech segmentation by infants and adults: a review and methodological considerations

N Boll-Avetisyan - … approaches to the phonological structure of words, 2018‏ - degruyter.com
Across languages, phonological words are restricted by constraints on their phonological
structure. As a by-product, word-internal phonological structure creates cues to word …

Superior learning in synesthetes: Consistent grapheme-color associations facilitate statistical learning

TA Forest, A Lichtenfeld, B Alvarez, AS Finn - Cognition, 2019‏ - Elsevier
In synesthesia activation in one sensory domain, such as smell or sound, triggers an
involuntary and unusual secondary sensory or cognitive experience. In the present study …

A gradient-based preference for sonority markedness constraints in reading: evidence for intact phonological grammar in developmental dyslexia

N Maïonchi-Pino, É Runge - Applied Psycholinguistics, 2024‏ - cambridge.org
How do children with developmental dyslexia process unattested or ill-formed phonological
sequences in their native language? This question warrants attention because these …

The metrical parse is guided by gradient phonotactics

P Olejarczuk, V Kapatsinski - Phonology, 2018‏ - cambridge.org
Phonotactic generalisations can be computed at different levels of granularity, from a coarse-
grained legal/illegal dichotomy (blick, dwick≻* bnick,* lbick) to a fine-grained gradient of …