Doctoral Dissertation Research: Role of Prior Knowledge in Consolidation of Novel Phonotactic Patterns for Speech Production

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Learning a new language opens up a myriad of opportunities for cross-cultural communication, which is critical to remaining competitive in today's globally networked information economy. But language learning is difficult, especially for adults, who must integrate new language experience with the language knowledge they already have. Previous research has found that sleep-based consolidation - an improvement in what you can recall as a result of sleep - is critical to this integration.

In fact, we must sleep before novel phonotactics - language-specific generalizations about how sounds can be ordered within syllables and words - become ingrained in speech processing (specifically, unconsciously shaping the errors we make while speaking). This project asks what role prior knowledge plays in this process: Can knowing similar phonotactics boost the effectiveness of sleep-based consolidation for learning novel phonotactics?

The findings of this research can inform the design of curricula and interventions to make language learning more effective, and can also shed light on how our brain changes as we learn. The project also includes the training of an undergraduate student as a research assistant and involves outreach about language learning to inform the larger public.

This project aims to clarify the role of prior knowledge in consolidating second-order phonotactic generalizations for speech production, by analyzing errors made in multi-day tongue-twister experiments that manipulate the structural similarity of novel second-order phonotactic generalizations with respect to previously-learned phonotactic generalizations. Structural similarity is operationalized in terms of syllabic positions involved in each generalization (onset-vowel, vowel-coda).

Two sources of prior knowledge are considered: participants' native language and pre-training using the experimental tongue-twister task. Activity monitors estimating time spent in slow-wave sleep are used to link consolidation effects observed in this study to those observed in studies in other cognitive and linguistic domains. To control for temporal-order differences between onset-vowel vs. vowel-coda generalizations, a non-linguistic button-pressing task tests for the absence of differences in learning start-middle vs. middle-end patterns.

The project also includes the training of an undergraduate student as a research assistant and involves outreach about language learning to inform the larger public.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.