The Effect of Complexity versus the Effect of Naturalness on Phonological Learning By

Brandon Prickett: The Effect of Complexity versus the Effect of Naturalness on Phonological Learning Recently a “surfeit of the stimulus” has been noticed in languages; specifically speakers do not seem to be learning all of the phonological patterns that exist in their language (Becker et al. 2007, 2008, 2011). Using the Hayes and Wilson (2008) phonotactic learner software to create a list of phonological patterns that are in English words, Hayes and White (2013) found that phonological constraints that were “natural”—that is typologically common and phonetically logical—seemed to have been learned better by speakers. Recent research using artificial languages has suggested that complexity has a stronger effect on phonological learning than naturalness (see Moreton and Pater 2012b for a review of experiments of this nature). The current study seeks to use Hayes and White’s methodology to test the effects of both naturalness and complexity on phonological learning. Subjects took part in an online experiment that presented an orthographic representation and an audio recording for each of the stimuli. Subjects were asked to numerically rate each of the words on how “good” they sounded in English and ratings of the experimental stimuli were compared with control group partners that did not break any constraints to determine how much of an effect each constraint had on the speakers’ judgments. The stronger a constraint’s effect was, the better learned it was assumed to be. Naturalness seemed to affect learning more than complexity—contradicting the findings of many recent studies on artificial language learning (see above citation) and suggesting that there could be significant differences in the processes that speakers use to learn real-world languages such as English and those used to learn artificial languages in a lab.