The role of linguistic experience in the development of the consonant bias
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The role of linguistic experience in the development of the consonant bias Amritha Mallikarjun1 · Emily Shroads1 · Rochelle S. Newman1 Received: 12 June 2020 / Revised: 18 September 2020 / Accepted: 26 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Consonants and vowels play different roles in speech perception: listeners rely more heavily on consonant information rather than vowel information when distinguishing between words. This reliance on consonants for word identification is the consonant bias Nespor et al. (Ling 2:203–230, 2003). Several factors modulate infants’ development of the consonant bias, including fine-grained temporal processing ability and native language exposure [for review, see Nazzi et al. (Curr Direct Psychol Sci 25:291–296, 2016)]. A rat model demonstrated that mature fine-grained temporal processing alone cannot account for consonant bias emergence; linguistic exposure is also necessary Bouchon and Toro (An Cog 22:839–850, 2019). This study tested domestic dogs, who have similarly fine-grained temporal processing but more language exposure than rats, to assess whether a minimal lexicon and small degree of regular linguistic exposure can allow for consonant bias development. Dogs demonstrated a vowel bias rather than a consonant bias, preferring their own name over a vowel-mispronounced version of their name, but not in comparison to a consonant-mispronounced version. This is the pattern seen in young infants Bouchon et al. (Dev Sci 18:587–598, 2015) and rats Bouchon et al. (An Cog 22:839–850, 2019). In a follow-up study, dogs treated a consonant-mispronounced version of their name similarly to their actual name, further suggesting that dogs do not treat consonant differences as meaningful for word identity. These results support the findings from Bouchon and Toro (An Cog 2:839–850, 2019), suggesting that there may be a default preference for vowel information over consonant information when identifying word forms, and that the consonant bias may be a human-exclusive tool for language learning. Keywords Canine cognition · Consonant bias · Dogs · Speech perception
Introduction If someone is telling you a story about an animal they saw recently, a dunkey, would you assume they are referring to a monkey or donkey? Both monkey and donkey refer to animals, and both differ from dunkey by one sound. Despite the similarities between these potential animal names, adults do not treat these possibilities as equally likely. Instead, they are more likely to assume that a dunkey refers to a donkey, rather than a monkey (Cutler et al. 2000). They will more readily accept a mispronunciation and access the intended target Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01436-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Amritha Mallikarjun [email protected] 1
University of Maryland, College Park, USA
word when the mispronounced word differs in vowel and
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