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Previous work has demonstrated that New Zealanders who do not speak Māori but are regularly exposed to the language develop implicit knowledge of it. The core of this knowledge, it has been argued, is the 'proto-lexicon'-a set of stored word-forms, without associated meaning, which yields subsequent Māori phonotactic and morphological knowledge. Previous research shows that having a proto-lexicon gives learners a head start in learning Māori word meanings in formal education. We investigate experimentally whether the proto-lexicon confers an advantage for attaching meanings to words. In Experiment 1, non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders were tested on their ability to identify meanings of Māori words in a forced-choice definition task, and they did this relatively well. Then, words with low accuracy were selected for Experiment 2, where non-Māori-speaking New Zealanders and non-New Zealanders were asked to learn meanings for Māori words and nonwords. New Zealanders performed better, indicating that familiarity with Māori word shapes confers an advantage. However, they showed no greater advantage for real words over nonwords. If these words are definitely in the proto-lexicon, then this would suggest that knowledge of individual word-forms does not, in fact, confer an advantage. In Experiment 3, we therefore explore whether the words in Experiment 2 are actually robustly in the participants' proto-lexicon, by running a word identification task with the same participants. These words were not robustly distinguished from nonwords. By selecting words for their lack of semantic knowledge, we also inadvertently selected words that do not appear to be in the proto-lexicon. Together, our results indicate that different levels of semantic knowledge exist for different words, even when we consider only words that cannot confidently be said to be in a full lexicon. The results suggest that the claim of previous studies that the proto-lexicon is 'without semantics' may be oversimplified.

Chong (2017) claims that a derived environment process is productive to the extent that it is supported by phonotactics. The present study tests this claim by comparing variable patterns observed in Korean vowel harmony of suffix alternation with vowel co-occurrence restrictions in the lexicon. A corpus study replicated findings of previous studies that the harmony in suffix alternation is losing productivity, conditioned by the quality of the stem vowel, the number of intervening consonants between the vowels and the stem class. Phonotactic generalisations in vowel sequences matched such tendencies in the alternation in that harmony was feeble in phonotactics and that some of the factors that modulate the harmony in alternation were found to affect the harmony in phonotactics as well. The findings generally support Chong’s claim that lack of phonotactic support for an alternation makes it harder to learn.

The aim of this contribution is to identify the dominant shapes of the Polish word with reference to three criteria: cluster complexity (i.e., cluster size), saturation (the number of clusters in a word), and diversity (in terms of features of consonant description). The dominant word shape is understood as the most frequent or typical skeletal pattern, expressed by means of alternations or groupings of Cs (consonants) and Vs (vowels), e.g., CVCCV etc., or by means of specific features (of place, manner, voice, and the sonorant/obstruent distinction). Our work focuses on 2 aspects of Polish phonotactics: (1) the relation between cluster complexity and saturation of words with clusters, (2) the degrees of diversity in features of place, manner, and voice within clusters. Using corpus data, we have established that only 4.17% of word shapes have no clusters. The dominant word shape for a one- cluster word is CVCCVCV. The most frequent scenario for a word shape is to contain two clusters, of which 67% are a combination of a word initial and a word medial cluster. We have found that: (1) cluster length is inversely proportional to the number of clusters in a word; (2) nearly 73% of word types contain clusters of the same size, e.g., two CCs or two CCCs (Polish words prefer saturation over complexity); (3) MOA is more diversified than POA across clusters and words.

Positive emotional responses from pleasant experiences are known to enhance memory, yet the relationship between aesthetic appeal and linguistic memory remains understudied. To investigate this relationship, we designed pseudowords of varying appeal based on Crystal's [1] phoneme rankings. Native English-speaking participants actively memorized these pseudowords and completed a free recall test, followed by two rounds of appeal ratings. Our results showed that, contrary to our predictions, pseudowords designed to be of intermediate appeal were rated as more appealing than those designed to be highly appealing or unappealing. Nevertheless, pseudowords designed to be highly appealing were recalled most frequently - even though participants themselves did not rate them as highly appealing. Also, overall, recalled words received higher appeal ratings from participants than non-recalled ones. These findings suggest that the phonemic and phonotactic composition of words may, indeed, have aesthetic value that correlates with words' memorability. This encourages further exploration into how appeal interacts with other factors influencing linguistic cognition, including occurrence frequency or complexity. Our findings can inform applications in language learning, teaching, and marketing, while also offering theoretical contributions to our understanding of language evolution and change.

Strings of letters or sounds that lack meaning (i.e., nonwords) have been used in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics to provide foundational knowledge of human processing and representation, and insights into language-related performance. The present set of studies used the machine psycholinguistic approach (i.e., using nonword stimuli and tasks similar to those used with humans) to gain insight into the performance of Chat GPT in comparison to human performance. In Study 1, Chat GPT was able to provide correct definitions to many extinct words (i.e., real English words that are no longer used). In Study 2 the nonwords were real words in Spanish, and Chat GPT was prompted to provide a word that sounded similar to the nonword. Responses tended to be Spanish words unless the prompt specified that the similar sounding word should be an English word. In Study 3 Chat GPT provided subjective ratings of wordlikeness (and buyability) that correlated with ratings provided by humans, and with the phonotactic probabilities of the nonwords. In Study 4, Chat GPT was prompted to generate a new English word for a novel concept. The results of these studies highlight certain strengths and weaknesses in human and machine performance. Future work should focus on developing AI that complements or extends rather than duplicates or competes with human abilities. The machine psycholinguistic approach may help to discover additional strengths and weaknesses of human and artificial intelligences.

Acquiring a new language requires individuals to simultaneously and gradually learn linguistic attributes on multiple levels. Here, we investigated how this learning process changes the neural encoding of natural speech by assessing the encoding of the linguistic feature hierarchy in second-language listeners. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals were recorded from native Mandarin speakers with varied English proficiency and from native English speakers while they listened to audio-stories in English. We measured the temporal response functions (TRFs) for acoustic, phonemic, phonotactic, and semantic features in individual participants and found a main effect of proficiency on linguistic encoding. This effect of second-language proficiency was particularly prominent on the neural encoding of phonemes, showing stronger encoding of “new” phonemic contrasts (i.e., English contrasts that do not exist in Mandarin) with increasing proficiency. Overall, we found that the nonnative listeners with higher proficiency levels had a linguistic feature representation more similar to that of native listeners, which enabled the accurate decoding of language proficiency. This result advances our understanding of the cortical processing of linguistic information in second-language learners and provides an objective measure of language proficiency. [Display omitted]

Pseudowords play an important role in psycholinguistic experiments, either because they are required for performing tasks, such as lexical decision, or because they are the main focus of interest, such as in nonwordreading and nonce-inflection studies. We present a pseudoword generator that improves on current methods. It allows for the generation of written polysyllabic pseudowords that obey a given language’s phonotactic constraints. Given a word or nonword template, the algorithm can quickly generate pseudowords that match the template in subsyllabic structure and transition frequencies without having to search through a list with all possible candidates. Currently, the program is available for Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Serbian, and Basque, and, with little effort, it can be expanded to other languages.

A pilot speech production experiment combined articulatory data obtained using Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA), along with acoustic measures, to investigate the effects of cluster size (CC vs. CCC) and morpheme boundaries on consonant cluster synchronicity for five speakers of Polish. We found that being placed in a larger cluster leads to less synchronous productions of two-consonant sequences. We also found, surprisingly, greater synchronicity for clusters spanning a morpheme boundary than for the same cluster within a morpheme. Our findings may be interpreted from a listener-oriented perspective in which speech production is sensitive to perceptual considerations.