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Iris Berent

Publications and source records attributed to Iris Berent.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions.

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd>lb). We demonstrate that such preferences modulate the perception of unattested onsets by English speakers: Monosyllabic auditory nonwords with onsets that are universally dispreferred (e.g., lbif) are more likely to be classified as disyllabic and misperceived as identical to their disyllabic counterparts (e.g., lebif) compared to onsets that are relatively preferred across languages (e.g., bdif). Consequently, dispreferred onsets benefit from priming by their epenthetic counterpart (e.g., lebif-lbif) as much as they benefit from identity priming (e.g., lbif-lbif). A similar pattern of misperception (e.g., lbif-->lebif) was observed among speakers of Russian, where clusters of this type occur. But unlike English speakers, Russian speakers perceived these clusters accurately on most trials, suggesting that the perceptual illusions of English speakers are partly due to their linguistic experience, rather than phonetic confusion alone. Further evidence against a purely phonetic explanation for our results is offered by the capacity of English speakers to perceive such onsets accurately under conditions that encourage precise phonetic encoding. The perceptual illusions of English speakers are also irreducible to several statistical properties of the English lexicon. The systematic misperception of universally dispreferred onsets might reflect their ill-formedness in the grammars of all speakers, irrespective of linguistic experience. Such universal grammatical preferences implicate constraints on language learning.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed2006

Roots, stems, and the universality of lexical representations: evidence from Hebrew.

Is the structure of lexical representations universal, or do languages vary in the fundamental ways in which they represent lexical information? Here, we consider a touchstone case: whether Semitic languages require a special morpheme, the consonantal root. In so doing, we explore a well-known constraint on the location of identical consonants that has often been used as motivation for root representations in Semitic languages: Identical consonants frequently occur at the end of putative roots (e.g., skk), but rarely occur in their beginning (e.g., ssk). Although this restriction has traditionally been stated over roots, an alternative account could be stated over stems, a representational entity that is found more widely across the world's languages. To test this possibility, we investigate the acceptability of a single set of roots, manifesting identity initially, finally or not at all (e.g., ssk versus skk versus rmk) across two nominal paradigms: CéCeC (a paradigm in which identical consonants are rare) and CiCúC (a paradigm in which identical consonants are frequent). If Semitic lexical representations consist of roots only, then similar restrictions on consonant co-occurrence should be observed in the two paradigms. Conversely, if speakers store stems, then the restriction on consonant co-occurrence might be modulated by the properties of the nominal paradigm (be it by means of statistical properties or their grammatical sources). Findings from rating and lexical decision experiments with both visual and auditory stimuli support the stem hypothesis: compared to controls (e.g., rmk), forms with identical consonants (e.g., ssk, skk) are less acceptable in the CéCeC than in the CiCúC paradigm. Although our results do not falsify root-based accounts, they strongly raise the possibility that stems could account for the observed restriction on consonantal identity. As such, our results raise fresh challenge to the notion that different languages require distinct sets of representational resources.

Humans↗
PubMed2005

Skeletal structure of printed words: evidence from the stroop task.

Do readers encode the sequencing of consonant (C) and vowel (V) phonemes (skeletal structure) in printed words? The authors used the Stroop task to examine readers' sensitivity to skeletal structure. In Experiment 1, CVC nonwords (e.g., pof) facilitated the naming of colors with congruent frames (e.g., red, a CVC word) but not with incongruent ones (e.g., green). In Experiment 2, the color black (a CCVC frame) was named faster with a congruent CCVC frame (e.g., grof) compared to either CCVCC (e.g., groft) or CVC (e.g., gof) incongruent controls. Finally, in Experiment 3, the color pink (a CVCC frame) was named faster with a CVCC frame (e.g., goft) compared to either CCVCC or CVC incongruent controls. In most cases, congruent frames shared no segments with the color name. These findings demonstrate that readers automatically assemble the skeletal structure of printed words.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2002

The scope of linguistic generalizations: evidence from Hebrew word formation.

Does the productive use of language stem from the manipulation of mental variables (e.g. "noun", "any consonant")? If linguistic constraints appeal to variables, rather than instances (e.g. "dog", "m"), then they should generalize to any representable novel instance, including instances that fall beyond the phonological space of a language. We test this prediction by investigating a constraint on the structure of Hebrew roots. Hebrew frequently exhibits geminates (e.g. ss) in its roots, but it strictly constraints their location: geminates are frequent at the end of the root (e.g. mss), but rare at its beginning (e.g. ssm). Symbolic accounts capture the ban on root-initial geminates as *XXY, where X and Y are variables that stand for any two distinct consonants. If the constraint on root structure appeals to the identity of abstract variables, then speakers should be able to extend it to root geminates with foreign phonemes, including phonemes with foreign feature values. We present findings from three experiments supporting this prediction. These results suggest that a complete account of linguistic processing must incorporate mechanisms for generalization outside the representational space of trained items. Mentally-represented variables would allow speakers to make such generalizations.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

The nature of regularity and irregularity: evidence from Hebrew nominal inflection.

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base's phonology (e.g., rat-rats), whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it (e.g., mouse-mice). The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that do not resemble existing nouns and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names (e.g., the Barak-Barakim), they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns (e.g., barak-brakim "lightning"), replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as "regular" or "irregular"; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.

Humans↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Identity avoidance in the Hebrew lexicon: implications for symbolic accounts of word formation.

Hebrew frequently exhibits geminates in the root but strictly constrains their location: Root-initial gemination is rare (e.g., ssm), whereas root-final gemination (e.g., smm) is frequent. Four experiments demonstrate that Hebrew speakers generalize this constraint to novel roots. When speakers are encouraged to form a triliteral root from a biconsonantal input (e.g., sm), they frequently reduplicate the root's final radical (e.g., smm), but not its initial radical (e.g., ssm). Likewise, the rejection of novel root foils with root initial geminates is easier than roots with final geminates. In both cases, speakers' performance is inexplicable by the statistical structure of the Hebrew language. Speakers' ability to freely generalize the constraint on root structure suggests that their linguistic competence appeals to mental variables.

Humans↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Does a theory of language need a grammar? Evidence from Hebrew root structure.

Hebrew constrains the occurrence of identical consonants in its roots: Identical consonants are acceptable root finally (e.g., skk), but not root initially (e.g., kks). Speakers' ability to freely generalize this constraint to novel phonemes (Berent, Marcus, Shimron, & Gafos, 2002) suggests that they represent segment identity-a relation among mental variables. An alternative account attributes the restriction on identical phonemes to their feature similarity, captured by either the number of shared features or their statistical frequency. The similarity account predicts that roots with partially similar consonants (e.g., sgk) should be at least as acceptable as roots with fully identical consonants (e.g., skk), and each of these roots should be less acceptable than dissimilar controls (e.g., gdn). Contrary to these predictions, three lexical decision experiments demonstrate that full identity is more acceptable than partial similarity and (in some cases) controls. Speakers' sensitivity to consonant identity suggests that linguistic competence, in general, and phonology, in particular, encompass a computational mechanism that operates over variables. This conclusion is consistent with linguistic accounts that postulate a symbolic grammatical component that is irreducible to the statistical properties of the lexicon.

Humans↗