Animates vs Inanimates in Kimenian: An Analysis of Implicit Morpho-phonological and Orthographic Rule Learning in Adult Native Speakers of Dutch

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Animates vs Inanimates in Kimenian: An Analysis of Implicit

Morpho-phonological and Orthographic Rule Learning in Adult Native Speakers of Dutch Master’s Thesis General Linguistics

University of Amsterdam

Janay Monen

Student Number: 10996745

Contact: janay.monen@outlook.com Thesis Supervisor: dr Judith Rispens Date: 28 June 2020

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Statement of Originality

I hereby declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it. The Faculty of Humanities is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.

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Abstract

Previous research on cross-situational learning has shown that both children and adults are able to acquire novel word-referent pairs after only brief exposure. The acquisition of spelling rules in a statistical learning setting, however, has only received little attention. The current research therefore assessed the morpho-phonological (vowel harmony) and

orthographic rule learning abilities of adult native speakers of Dutch by introducing them to an artificial language with animacy components. Through a Cross-Situational World

Learning Task (CSWLT), participants went through a short exposure phase, a comprehension spelling post-test and a production spelling post-test, of which the latter two served as the present study’s main focus. The Dutch speakers were exposed to word-referent stimuli that were either animate or inanimate in nature and were expected to select and produce the correct orthographic representations based on what they had learned during the exposure phase. Findings demonstrated a successful acquisition of the spelling rules, i.e. the semantic and grammatical animacy properties that were inherent to the artificial language. Due to the setup of the experiment, these findings could not be extended to the production data, which leaves room for questions. Other results indicated performance advantages for inanimate items as well as a comprehension advantage for Dutch native speakers. Modality and interactions between certain elements, however, did not significantly affect performance in any way. The study ends with a discussion about the possible implications of these findings.

Keywords: Animacy; Artificial language; Cross-situational learning; CSWLT; Morpho-phonology; Orthography; Spelling; Statistical learning; Vowel harmony

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Human beings possess the ability to acclimate themselves to the regularities in their surroundings. Their acquired mannerisms and daily routines seem to be the product of this phenomenon. According to Reber (1967), this type of adaptation often occurs without one’s overt effort and conscious awareness, something which is referred to as implicit learning. Similar to mannerisms and routines, regularities also play an important role in language acquisition. An example of this can be found in the acquisition of word-meaning pairs

through their co-occurrence with events perceived in the real world, where one of the biggest obstacles is to identify the correct referent of a novel word out of a seemingly infinite number of possibilities (Yu & Smith, 2007). Quine (1960) illustrated this with his famous Gavagai problem. In his illustration, a linguist observing native speakers of an unknown language hears one of the speakers utter Gavagai upon seeing a rabbit in a field. Due to the

unfamiliarity with the foreign language, the meaning of the utterance cannot simply be inferred based on this experience alone. Though one’s first thought might be to map Gavagai onto the rabbit, the speaker might have referred to the field, the rabbit’s actions or just a specific part of the rabbit (e.g. its ears or fur color). The question then remains how word-meaning pairs are acquired. One solution to this problem seems to be in the form of multiple encounters with the given word-meaning pair.

Within the linguistic field, such implicit word learning is often investigated through the adaptation of cross-situational learning paradigms, in which the given information units, i.e. word-referent mappings, are acquired across various learning trials after only short periods of exposure. Though prior research has extensively investigated children’s and (to a lesser extent) adult’s abilities to acquire novel nouns and verbs through cross-situational exposure, there is a lack of focus on their morpho-phonological (i.e. sound changes when morphemes combine) and orthographic (i.e. spelling) skills as well as the relation between acquiring language cross-situationally and the property of animacy, i.e. whether the referent is living or non-living. Therefore, the current study will focus on the more

morpho-phonological spelling aspect of cross-situational learning by introducing a group of adult native Dutch speakers to an artificial language in which grammatical and semantic animacy features play a crucial role.

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2. Literature Review

2.1 Statistical Learning in a Cross-situational Setting

To elaborate on the topic of cross-situational learning in the linguistic context, it can be defined as a type of visual associative learning technique that is used to acquire the meanings of words in the form of word-referent mappings after various exposures (Smith & Smith, 2012). See Figure 1 for a simple illustration.

As Quine (1960) has shown with his Gavagai problem, the individual exposed to the word-referent mapping pairs might initially not be very certain about the link between the word and the referent after each individual exposure (in which the same word-referent pair appears in a different context). Blythe, Smith & Smith (2010) refer to this ambiguity as exposure-by-exposure uncertainty, which implies that upon each exposure-by-exposure, the true meaning of the referent remains somewhat uncertain. It is never made explicitly clear to the individual that a

particular word belongs to a specific referent, but the individual can only assume this link after sufficient exposure, similar to what was illustrated in Figure 1. That is part of the implicit nature of the cross-situational design.

Cross-situational learning. Explanation replicated from Smith & Smith (2012).

“Each time the word horse is used, the context provides a different set of candidate meanings. Uncertainty about the meaning of the word is gradually reduced and finally eliminated through its appearance in multiple exposures, as candidate meanings which are not suggested by each context are eliminated from consideration” (p.865).

Figure 1

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Despite the ambiguity of word-referent associations that are often encountered by individuals during a cross-situational learning experiment, various previous researches have shown that children as well as adults are able to learn (novel) word-referent pairs after only brief periods of exposure, i.e. the process of fast-mapping (Carey & Bartlett, 1978; Horst & Samuelson, 2008). It is therefore important to discuss this phenomenon in terms of what has been found. Examples of some older and more recent studies on children’s cross-situational learning abilities on the one hand are Akthar & Montague (1999) and Suanda, Mugwanya & Namy (2014), who investigated children between the ages of two and seven years-old. Both studies seem to provide evidence that confirms the assumption of various theorists that “children may learn the meaning of a new word by paying attention to the element that remains constant across multiple uses of that word” (Akthar & Montague, 1999; p. 347). This, according to the authors, provides some crucial evidence behind the children’s underlying learning mechanisms and strategies as it resembles the way adults approach statistical learning (Suanda et al., 2014). On the other hand, Yu & Smith (2007), Monaghan et al. (2015) and Zettersten et al. (2018) investigated adults’ abilities to acquire entire new concepts in similar cross-situational learning settings as those introduced to the children, with ages ranging from 18-69. Overall, adult participants were able to learn the word-picture mappings through cross-trial statistical relations (Yu & Smith, 2007) but with nouns generally having an advantage over verbs during the learning process (Monaghan et al., 2015). This seems to suggest that adult learners in particular are able to exploit statistical consistencies that occur during the word learning trials, which results in the development of various association patterns (Zettersten et al., 2018).

For both children and adults, previous studies have thus demonstrated that

participants are indeed capable of acquiring novel words/concepts and the connections with their referents by making use of statistical regularities. However, the majority of the studies conducted on cross-situational learning have focused on the morphological aspect, e.g. mapping novel nouns or verbs onto objects or actions and asking participants to verbally produce or identify the acquired items. The acquisition of morpho-phonological and orthographic spelling patterns in the form of cross-situational learning has not yet been the focus of many studies. This constitutes a significant gap in the current knowledge and understanding of the link between novel language learning through cross-statistical regularities and its effect on one’s spelling abilities. The following section will therefore elaborate on these morpho-phonological and orthographic features.

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2.2 Morpho-phonology, Orthography and Prior Statistical Research

Morpho-phonology is the linguistic branch that is concerned with the way in which morphological (word) and phonological (sound) processes interact. More specifically, when morphemes (a language’s smallest meaningful units) combine to create a word, the

morphemes can possibly influence each other’s sound constructions. A language’s morpho-phonological constructions are typically expressed in the shape of rules, which usually allows for a prediction of similarly related variations that might be present in the language, e.g. in English, leaf becomes leaves, in which the /f/ is replaced by /v/ to make the item plural. A well-known example of such a morpho-phonological rule is that of vowel harmonization. This is a constraint-based assimilatory process in which the vowels of a particular word become more similar or identical to each other, i.e. part of the same vowel class. As (1) demonstrates, Korean is a language in which vowel harmony occurs:

(1) Word before vowel harmony: 부엌 (bueok) [puːʌk] – ‘kitchen’ Morphemes: 부 + 엌 (bu) + (eok) [puː] + [ʌk]

After vowel harmony: [puː.ʌk] becomes something like [pwʌk]

When it comes to the acquisition of morpho-phonological rules, Finley & Badecker (2009) claim that vowel harmony is a suitable phonological (but also morpho-phonological) process for assessing one’s abilities to generalize the acquired rules to novel segments. At the same time, it might shed some light on the individual’s approach to rule learning in general. Non-statistical morpho-phonological rule learning in terms of vowel harmony acquisition has been extensively investigated in children still acquiring their first language (e.g. Leiwo, Kulju & Aoyama, 2006; Cohen, 2012) and in adults learning a second language (e.g. Özçelik & Sprouse, 2016; Schmid et al., 2019), which for the purpose of the present study, will not be discussed in detail. To a lesser extent, researchers have investigated artificial grammar learning (AGL) where one’s abilities to acquire a non-existing grammar in a laboratory-like setting are investigated to get a better understanding of the processes underlying human language. Finley & Badecker (2009), for instance, found that adult learners were able to grasp the vowel harmony rules through an AGL paradigm. However, the literature on vowel harmony acquisition of an artificial language in a cross-situational setting is scarce, which leaves room for further investigation.

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Apart from the scarcity of literature on cross-situational morpho-phonological rule learning, the acquisition of spelling rules (orthography) in a similar setting has not yet been much of a focus point either. Orthography basically comprises a language’s conventional spelling system, i.e. the way in which words are supposed to be written. According to Samara & Caravolas (2014), one of the more upcoming topics in the field of language acquisition is that of orthographic knowledge and its influence on spelling abilities. So far, only few empirical studies have investigated the mechanisms underlying orthographic acquisition as well as the spelling patterns in a setting where the experimental conditions are

well-controlled, e.g. manipulation of stimuli and exposure time. An important reason to consider orthography as an element that plays a role in the acquisition of a novel language is the fact that the learner might benefit from orthographic properties during language learning (Bürki et al., 2019). Think of properties such as frequently occurring letter sequences or being able to identify silent graphemes (the smallest meaningful units in a writing system, e.g. /gh/ in the word ghost) that are only visible in the orthography, a phenomenon that Treiman & Kessler (2006) have discussed in light of their statistical learning study on English-speaking 6 to 13-year-old children’s abilities to spell non-words. Their findings suggest that orthographic knowledge may be the key to mastering a novel language. This goes against previous views that have suggested beginning spellers have the language’s phonology as their only source of information (Frith, 1985) and stresses the importance of the orthographic aspect. Zhao et al.’s (2018) study on artificial orthography learning investigated adults in a statistical learning setup in which orthography forms were associated with meaning (but not cross-situationally). Overall findings implied that participants were able to acquire the artificial orthography over the course of several blocks in terms of both the semantic (judgment) and phonological (recall) aspect. However, apart from the absence of a cross-situational design, it would have been interesting to see whether the participants’ newly acquired semantic and phonological abilities matched with their writing abilities, which is something Zhao et al. (2018) did not take into account.

Since the above-mentioned information on both the morpho-phonological and orthographic aspect give way to new research opportunities, a new type of research design that combines both elements with statistical learning could lead to valuable discoveries within the language acquisition field.

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2.3 Learning through Statistical Regularities: The Animacy Effect

When talking about the acquisition of word-referent pairs in combination with morpho-phonological spelling rules, it is only natural to include the concept of animacy as referents may have different spelling patterns based on their animacy features. The concept of animacy is both a grammatical and semantic feature. Namely, while its grammatical aspect revolves around the phonological (sound) and orthographic (spelling) features of a given label, its semantic aspect revolves more around the label’s meaning attributes in terms of being able to differentiate living from non-living entities. According to Bonin, Gelin & Bugaiska (2014), animate and inanimate entities play an important role in the acquisition of language. Animate entities refer to living things, e.g. boy, dog, whereas inanimate entities consist of non-living things, e.g. sleep, happiness. More specifically, these animate entities can be distinguished from inanimate entities based on several characteristics as presented in Gelman & Spelke (1981) and Bonin et al. (2014):

1. Animates can initiate action or movement; inanimates need an actor to do so 2. Animates are able to procreate and evolve

3. Animates are able to comprehend, perceive, express emotions, learn and think 4. Animates are biological beings that exist

Apart from the distinguishing characteristics that make up animate and inanimate entities, Bonin et al. (2014) and Laurino & Kaczer (2019) claim that animates are to be processed first over inanimates. The authors refer to this as the animacy effect, which points to the

observation that animate stimuli are better maintained in one’s memory as opposed to inanimate stimuli. Through statistical (but not cross-situational) real-word (Bonin et al., 2014) and novel word (Laurino & Kaczer, 2019) learning tasks, animate and inanimate stimuli were introduced to adult participants. Both studies found evidence for the animacy effect through better recall and recognition abilities for animate items. Laurino & Kaczer (2019) even found additional proof for a higher processing speed of animate rather than inanimate items. Despite the fact that the animacy effect has been somewhat investigated in the novel language learning context, “where a new link between a novel word form, a new meaning and a referent is being formed” (Laurino & Kaczer 2019, p. 2), the majority of the studies, however, have concerned themselves with the acquisition of the word’s morphology and the processing speeds of animate vs inanimate items through response time measures.

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Animacy in combination with the morpho-phonological and orthographic rule aspects of language learning in a cross-situational setting has not yet been investigated in depth. It could therefore be useful to fill this gap by exploring the grammatical and semantic features of animacy, such as through using AGL. This would then serve as a way to assess one’s spelling abilities but also to possibly discover more about the underlying processes involved in lexical acquisition and its relation to animacy.

2.4 Differences in Comprehension and Production Performances: Asymmetries A more exploratory but nonetheless important part of an individual’s language

development is the highly debated topic of the relationship between one’s comprehension and production abilities when acquiring a novel language. Especially when looking at young children, it seems evident to parents that they can understand more words than they are able to produce (refer to Benedict (1979) for longitudinal empirical evidence in 10 to 16-month-olds). As Clark (1993) has stated, “logically, comprehension must precede production” since the speaker “must already have mapped the relevant meanings onto specific forms, and have these units represented in memory, to be accessed on subsequent occasions whenever they hear the relevant forms from others” (p. 246). How is it possible for a learner to have knowledge of a word but is not able to produce it? And is this language phenomenon only evident in children or in older age groups as well? Hahn & Gershkoff-Stowe (2010) and Gershkoff-Stowe & Hahn (2013) are two statistical novel word learning studies that investigated the comprehension and production abilities in 2 to 3-year-old children and adults. For production, they made use of noun and action naming tasks, where participants were required to name the object/action based on the experimenter’s question “What is this?” while pointing to an object or making it perform an action. For comprehension, a forced-choice task had been implemented where participants had to choose one of either four or six presented objects that corresponded best with the experimenter’s question “Where’s

booma?”. Authors of both studies found a so-called asymmetry, with comprehension being significantly more advanced than production after similar periods of learning. Regardless of the age, participants demonstrated this comprehension-production asymmetry, which seems to be in line with Clark’s (1993) statement. Rather than assessing language abilities through the statistical learning of an artificial language, Hendriks & Koster (2010), however,

discussed findings of prior research that had administered picture comprehension and picture naming tasks to young children. In contrast to other findings, the results pointed to an inverse asymmetry effect in young English-speaking children from the age of 4, which is known as

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the “Delay of Principle B Effect”. Consider a context in which Harry and Ron are the only two individuals present. Once the child encounters the phrase Harry washed him, young English-speaking children will often interpret this incorrectly and assume that Harry washed himself rather than Ron, resulting in a production-comprehension asymmetry. It is thus important to keep the distinction between these two language aspects in mind, especially since there is evidence that children and even adults significantly differ in terms of their understanding and speaking abilities. Furthermore, the contradictory asymmetry findings of prior studies require additional investigation to get to the bottom of the possible different lexical processes at work during comprehension and production.

3. The Present Study

The main goal of the current study was to assess the abilities of adult Dutch native speakers in a cross-situational experiment that focuses on the acquisition of morpho-phonological and orthographic rules of an artificial language. As has been discussed in the previous sections, as a result of the scarce number of studies on this specific topic,

particularly on the morpho-phonological and orthographic aspects, it is important to expand on the previous literature by including such elements. Participants were introduced to a Cross-Situational Word Learning Task (CSWLT) that was originally designed by

Abrahamse, Monaghan & Rispens (in preparation). Due to the importance of the semantic property animacy, the target patterns in the CSWLT therefore consisted of the categories animate vs inanimate, with each of them having distinguishing spelling patterns that were mapped onto their corresponding objects. More specifically, animate items were identified by non-existing labels, either spoken and/or presented orthographically depending on the testing condition and composed of two syllables of which the latter syllable contained an identical vowel to the first syllable, e.g. /e/. This was a type of morpho-phonological rule that was referred to as vowel harmony in section 2.2. Additionally, animate items always ended in /r/ + /h/. The /h/-spelling rule, specifically, was important because this was not an audible sound. Participants were thus only able to learn this rule through multiple visual exposures. In

contrast to the pattern for animate items, the inanimate stimuli were not characterized by vowel harmony, but rather a consistent regular affix /ek/. Animacy and vowel harmony were implemented by Abrahamse et al. (in preparation) since it can be found in several natural languages, but not in Dutch, the native tongue of the participants. This was done to minimize linguistic entrenchment among participants, which refers to “the influence of previously

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assimilated knowledge on the learning of the statistical properties from a new input” (Siegelman et al. 2018; p.199). It would thus account for any expectations of participants about statistical learning that could possibly affect their performances.

Based on this information, it was then the aim to ascertain whether the statistical information presented to the participants in the CSWLT was sufficient for them to detect and identify the specific morpho-phonological and orthographic spelling patterns that

accompanied the novel objects and beings throughout the experiment. Important to note is that the learning setting was implicit as a means to confirm whether Dutch adults were truly able to learn from statistical regularities alone. Therefore, the main research question that this research addressed was the following:

RQ 1: Are adult native Dutch speakers, with the available statistical information, able to acquire the correct morpho-phonological and orthographic spelling rules of an artificial language in an implicit cross-situational learning setting?

Based on the above-mentioned studies that have used a cross-situational learning paradigm in which adult learners were assessed on their performances, it has become clear that they are able to acquire target patterns based on statistical regularities (Yu & Smith, 2007; Monaghan et al., 2015; Zettersten et al., 2018). The same applies for existing literature on morpho-phonology and orthography learning (Finley & Badecker, 2009; Zhao et al.’s, 2018). The current study will adopt a similar assumption as the previous literature has introduced since there is no reason to suspect that the participants in this study will perform significantly different. From this it can therefore be hypothesized that adult Dutch native speakers will be able to acquire the correct spelling rules of an artificial language in the CSWLT.

A logical question to follow from the main research question is one that considers the performance of adult Dutch natives on the animacy aspect, and thus whether performance on animate vs inanimate items will show understanding of the semantic and grammatical rules behind these categories, i.e. the meaning attributes as well as the morpho-phonological and orthographic properties. In other words:

RQ 2: Will adult Dutch native speakers be able to detect and recognize the grammatical as well as the semantic aspect of the property animacy during the CSWLT, with its animate and inanimate categories?

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Since Bonin et al. (2014) and Laurino & Kaczer (2019) have shown that the animacy effect leads to faster processing as well as better recall and recognition skills of animates as opposed to inanimates, the present study will assume that adult Dutch native speakers will show sensitivity to the grammatical and semantic aspects of the property animacy, of which responses to animate items will overall be more accurate. A significant difference in

performance of animate vs inanimate items will therefore be expected.

Aside from the main aims of the current study, another topic will be addressed as well. However, it has to be mentioned that the following questions and hypotheses are more exploratory in nature as the underlying mechanisms behind the phenomenon are still quite ambiguous and will need further exploration to make solid claims. They merely serve to touch upon factors that may play an important role in the cross-situational statistical learning process, especially since one’s abilities might be affected under certain learning

circumstances. One factor that might affect performance concerns the production and comprehension abilities as a result of statistical learning. The second and third task in the CSWLT consist of 1) a comprehension (choose 1 out of 3) and 2) a production post-test (complete the word with the correct spelling). Both parts therefore target different aspects of language acquisition. Since competing theories of production and comprehension

asymmetries have been introduced by a number of studies, the current study would like to explore this further with a focus on adult learners, especially as those that have discovered a production advantage over comprehension have been found for children rather than adults. Additionally, it would be interesting to see whether a correlation exists between production and comprehension scores. This resulted in the following exploratory research questions:

EXPL RQ 1: Are the outcomes of the comprehension task significantly different from the production task?

EXPL RQ 2: Do the performance scores of both tasks positively correlate with each other?

Considering the fact that previous research that has investigated adult learners in terms of comprehension and production have demonstrated significant differences between these two language aspects, the present study adopts a similar view in the sense that performances on the comprehension task will significantly differ from the production task, demonstrating the so-called comprehension-production asymmetry, i.e. comprehension will be more advanced

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than production (Hahn & Gershkoff-Stowe, 2010; Gershkoff-Stowe & Hahn, 2013). To the author’s knowledge, prior research does not have any predictions that can be adopted with regards to correlations between comprehension and production performances in similar settings, so it will be assumed that a positive correlation will be found. This is based on the belief that if the participants have learned the spelling rules, they should be able to perform well on both tasks and if they have not acquired enough knowledge, their performance on both tasks will be poor. However, it is important to take into account that the comprehension and production task designs are quite distinct in nature and do not necessarily allow for an accurate direct comparison. Therefore, findings should be interpreted with some caution.

4. Method

Please note that the CSWLT, its non-word stimuli and any relevant pre-tests were originally designed by Abrahamse et al. (in preparation). Similarly, the participant data that is reported below was collected by said researchers and not the author of the present study.

4.1 Participants

A total of 49 adult native speakers of Dutch participated in the CSWLT. The data from 4 of those participants had to be excluded, which will be discussed in section 4.6.1. In order to control for any potential biases, it was made sure that during the recruiting of the participants, none of those partaking in the study had any prior knowledge of linguistics. Participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 40. However, apart from age (i.e. adult) and linguistic knowledge, no additional factors were taken into account. Additionally, participants reported intact auditory acuity as well as corrected-to-normal vision and did not have any history of speech and/or language disorder diagnoses. Before partaking in the experiment, participants provided a written informed consent which had previously been approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

4.2 Materials

4.2.1 Stimuli

Abrahamse et al. (in preparation) designed an artificial language called Kimenian to which the participants were introduced throughout the experiment. The total stimuli set consisted of 48 pictures that represented either novel animate (n=24) or novel inanimate

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(n=24) items, of which each picture belonged to a specific label. Below, the picture and word stimuli are discussed separately.

4.2.1.1 Auditory and Orthographic Stimuli.

The labels were made up of two syllables each and were characterized by the following structure: CVCVC. The main difference between the animate and inanimate item labels, however, lies within their morpho-phonological and orthographic spelling rules. Whereas inanimate items were identified by means of a fixed rule, animate items could be recognized through a more flexible and variable rule. 48 monosyllabic non-word stems in CVC format were generated and assigned randomly to the animate or inanimate category. Subsequently, these non-word stems were morphed into two-syllable words according to their animate or inanimate rule. Regardless of their assigned animacy categories, the item’s first syllable always contained the stress. Examples of both item types with their morpho-phonological and orthographic rules are presented Table 1.

Table 1 Morpho-phonological and Orthographic Rules for Animate and Inanimate Items

Animate items Inanimate items

Variable rule

1. The vowel in the second syllable of the concerning item is always identical to the vowel in the first syllable (vowel harmony) 2. Always ends in /rh/, with /r/ as an audible sound and the /h/ being silent

Example: à Stem: poek

à Apply rule: + vowel harmony + /rh/ à Result: poekoerh

Fixed rule

1. The concerning inanimate item always ends in /ek/

Example: à Stem: mul à Apply rule: + /ek/ à Result: mulek

Note that Table 1 not only highlights the fact that animate and inanimate items have an auditory difference but a visible difference as well. It is therefore important to keep the /h/-spelling rule that is inherent to the animate items in mind since this was added by Abrahamse et al. (in preparation) to test the participants’ abilities to implicitly acquire orthography

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without the assistance of phonological properties. Think, for instance, of the Dutch noun boot (‘boat’), of which the plural is written as boten (the en is used here to form the plural).

Though the orthographic form changes, the phonological sound of the /o/ vowel remains the same. This spelling rule is therefore something that learners of Dutch have to acquire through sufficient exposure to the orthographic form.

Vitevitch et al. (1997) has suggested that the phonotactic probability, the likelihood for a set of phonemes to occur in a specific order, could possibly affect one’s ability to learn and process words. Therefore, Abrahamse et al. (in preparation) accounted for this during the generation of all their non-word stimuli. The phonotactic probabilities (PPs) of the novel items used for the experiment were calculated with the help of the Dutch phonotactic probability database (Adriaans, 2006) and the corpus of spoken Dutch (Oostdijk, 2000). For all items, the researchers attempted to keep the PPs as similar as possible. They calculated the average phonotactic frequency of the non-word stimuli by looking at the probability of a given phoneme in word-initial position, then the probability of that phoneme combining with sequential phonemes and lastly the probability of said phoneme in word-final position. Appendix A provides an overview of the PPs with their corresponding non-word stimuli.

Additionally, taking into account Dutch phonotactics, the following 6 vowels were used by Abrahamse et al. (in preparation) to make up the novel words: /e/ [eː], /a/ [aː], /i/ [i], /o/ [oː], /oe/ [u], /u/ [y]. It was established that the number of items containing each of these vowels was similar for the animate as well as the inanimate condition. However, it needs to be pointed out that for the vowel /e/ in the inanimate condition, it was not possible to

generate any non-words such as fees à fes-ek or mees à mes-ek, as this would have clashed with the vowel harmony rule that was associated with the animate items. As has been

mentioned, in order for something to be considered an animate item, the vowel in the first syllable needs to be the same as the vowel in the second part of the word. Implementing such items as fesek or mesek (supposedly inanimate items) in the experiment would have blurred the boundary between fixed rule of inanimate items and the variable rule that characterized animate items. It was therefore decided to leave out this vowel and instead, one additional token was added to each of the remaining vowels apart from the vowel /u/ (since there were only 24 inanimate items and 5 vowel categories), resulting in 4 tokens of /u/-words and 5 tokens of the other vowels in the non-words. The whole set of items was then subsequently pre-recorded by a Dutch native female speaker, of which the digitized files were used throughout the experiment.

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4.2.1.2 Visual Stimuli.

Out of the 48 pictures, 24 represented (inanimate) unfamiliar objects and the other 24 represented (animate) unfamiliar beings. These were all taken from the Novel Object and Unusual Name (NOUN) Database (Horst & Hout, 2016) by Abrahamse et al. (in

preparation). The animate pictures, specifically, consisted of 3D-animation creatures,

whereas the inanimate pictures contained unknown 3D objects, all of which can be viewed in appendix B1 and B2.

As the CSWLT deals with animate and inanimate item categories, the researchers considered it important to ensure that the participants of this study would be able to

categorize the items as such. They therefore found it crucial to have an additional group rate a set of 52 test items for animacy before the actual experiment was conducted. A group of 13 Dutch first-year linguistics students (undergraduates) did so by means of a 7-point Likert Scale. To ensure a reliable outcome, Abrahamse et al. (in preparation) made sure the stimuli was randomized and always presented with a question, e.g. Ik vind dit item levend en in staat om te voelen (‘I think this item is alive and able to feel’). Each page contained the following three phrases to establish a sense of understanding of the 7-point-dotted Likert Scale among the sample group: niet levend en voelend (‘not alive and feeling’; centered left), neutraal (‘neutral’; centered), erg levend en voelend (‘very alive and feeling’; centered right).

Outcomes, which were averaged over the sample group, demonstrated an average of 4 and 5 for animate items (minimum score of 4.31), whereas inanimate items averaged at 1 or 2 (maximum score of 2.08) for animacy. Animate items were not averaged at 6 or 7, which could have been due to the fact that the items were unfamiliar to the participants and not considered human- or animal-like. The living and feeling of the creatures in the images is therefore assumed to be limited in comparison to real humans and animals. Based on these findings, 4 of the animate items that received the lowest animacy rating as well as 1 inanimate item were excluded, leaving a total of 48 images to be used throughout the experiment.

4.3 Design

The CSWLT consisted of three separate tasks in an implicit learning setting, which each tested the participants’ learning abilities on a different level. Though the current study is mainly concerned with tasks two and three, it is still important to discuss the entire setup of

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the experiment. The sections below will therefore elaborate on the following three separate tasks: learning, comprehension (post-test 1) and production (post-test 2).

4.3.1 Learning Phase: Exposure to Morpho-phonological and Orthographic Properties

The first task was a learning phase in which participants assumed they would be learning some novel nouns. However, the learning phase actually focused on exposing the participants to the morpho-phonological and orthographic properties of animate and inanimate items through a cross-situational learning paradigm. Through brief periods of exposure, the idea was that participants would acquire 8 animate and 8 inanimate nouns, together with their corresponding images. Participants were presented with a non-word noun, either in a sound or no-sound condition, together with two images displayed on a laptop screen. In the sound condition, participants were both auditorily and orthographically presented with the stimuli, whereas in the no-sound condition, they were merely presented with the orthographic spelling. Based on the noun, participants were expected to choose the corresponding picture. In the end, out of the 49 participants, a total of 23 was assigned the sound condition, whereas the other 26 went through the no-sound condition. The learning task consisted of 6 training blocks with 16 trials each, wherein the novel inanimate objects and novel animate beings occurred both once as the target and once as a non-target

(distractor). Additionally, animate and inanimate images occurred together in only 50% of the trials (i.e. different categories), whereas in the other 50% of the trials, the two images were within the same category.

After exposure to the items and their corresponding images, participants were unknowingly tested on their already acquired knowledge. This was done by introducing another 8 novel animate and 8 novel inanimate non-word items that were not presented throughout the initial exposure phase. This test phase consisted of two blocks (T1; T2) with 8 trials each: 4 included an inanimate non-target and an animate target, whereas the other 4 included an animate non-target and an inanimate target. Since participants were not familiar with these word-picture stimuli, choosing the correct answer based on statistics was out of the question. They were therefore expected to rely on their newly acquired linguistic knowledge of the concept animacy (i.e. the /ek/ spelling rule for inanimate items; the vowel harmony + /r/ + /h/ spelling rules for animate items). Performance above chance-level was then expected if the participants were able to identify the different morpho-phonological and orthographic spelling properties that characterized animate and inanimate items.

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For both the learning and test-phase, the randomization of the picture stimuli was taken into account to ensure that each animate and inanimate image occurred both once on the left and once on the right throughout the experiment. See (2) for an example trial, where the left image serves as the target poekoerh.

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4.3.2 Comprehension: Morpho-phonological and Orthographic Rule Understanding

The second task was a 3-Alternative Forced Choice (3-AFC) task that targeted the participant’s comprehension abilities on a morpho-phonological and orthographic level. Similar to the previous learning task, participants were introduced to 8 novel animate and 8 novel inanimate non-word items. Different from the previous task, however, was that

participants were only presented with 16 trials (1 of them being a practice trial), in which one image together with three distinct orthographic representations of the novel object or being were displayed. Additionally, due to the lack of sound conditions, participants relied solely on their reading abilities. For every single trial, one out of three orthographic representations served as the target for either an animate or inanimate item. The remaining two served as distractor items. The target always included the morpho-phonological and/or orthographic spelling rules. For animate items, this included the stem + vowel harmony (morpho-phonological) and a /r/ + /h/ suffix (orthographic), e.g. huguhr. Inanimate targets always consisted of a stem + an /ek/ suffix (orthographic), e.g. wapek. The distractors were divided into two categories: 1. Hard distractors; 2. Easy distractors. Hard distractors were more deviant from the target while easy distractors were more similar to the target. For animate items, the hard distractor lacked vowel harmony but always included the correct /r/ + /h/ suffix (e.g. hugarh), whereas the easy distractor always included vowel harmony but left out the /h/ spelling rule (e.g. hugur). For inanimate items, the hard distractor violated the spelling

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rule by applying vowel harmony rather than the fixed /ek/ suffix, e.g. wapak. The easy distractors, however, always followed the /ek/ spelling rule, but included an additional silent /h/, e.g. wapekh. See (3) for an example trial in which huguhr is the target.

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Note that the vowels used to create a vowel harmony violation were identical to those used throughout the whole experiment: /a/, /e/, /ie/, /o/, /oe/, /u/. Acquired knowledge of both the morpho-phonological and orthographic rules behind Kimenian was then accomplished if there was an above chance-level performance on this comprehension task. In this case, that equals above 33% correct as the task deals will 3 choices. Would it have been a 2-AFC, the baseline would have been 50%.

Similar to the first task, the positions in which target and distractor items as well as the order of the animate vs inanimate stimuli were presented to the participants was

randomized to ensure more reliable and accurate outcomes.

4.3.3 Production: Morpho-phonological and Orthographic Rule Production

The final task served as a way to assess participants’ acquired knowledge of the novel language by letting them produce the animate and inanimate non-word items in a total of 16 trials, including 1 practice trial. Rather than being presented with three given spelling

options, participants were only given one orthographic representation of the stem of either an animate or inanimate item, together with its corresponding picture as demonstrated in (4). Based on the image and the word stem, participants were thus expected to complete the word by either applying the fixed rule for inanimate items or the variable rule by which animate items were identified. Additionally, for similar reasons, the order in which the animate and inanimate conditions were presented to the participants was randomized for this task as well.

2. hugahr

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Unlike for the learning and comprehension task, however, it was not possible to simply establish a baseline since there were no norm scores available for this part of the CSWLT. With regards to performance above chance-level and thus the learning effect, it is therefore not possible to make any solid claims. Section 4.6.3 will briefly elaborate on this matter.

4.3.4 Randomization

Abrahamse et al. (in preparation) created a total of 4 versions of the experiment to ensure that any possible effects could not be due to some item-specific characteristics. The 4 versions consisted of version Q, R, S and T and each of the participants was assigned one of these versions. The randomization for animate and inanimate picture stimuli was done separately and subsequently, the stimuli was manually organized to make sure there was an even distribution of colors (of the items) within each version to prevent any false assumptions about the underlying rules of the novel language (e.g. associating a color with a morpho-phonological rule). Additionally, though the stimuli (orthographic and visual) were matched similarly in each version, i.e. each image always has the same label, the trial in which such a stimuli match appeared could differ per version due to the randomization. This was to ensure a different input for each participant.

4.4 Apparatus

The experiment was conducted on a Windows Surface Tablet with touchscreen, enabling participants to press the correct answers. The software used for the CSWLT was created by Dirk Jan Vet from the UvA speech lab. Lastly, for those participants in the sound condition, auditory stimuli were presented through headphones.

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4.5 Procedure

The administration of the CSWLT took place on an individual basis, with the participants seated comfortably in a quiet room or space such as at the University of Amsterdam, the library or the participants’ home. Before the actual experiment could start, participants were told that the experiment consisted of 2 parts (learning and post-testing). As has been mentioned, the learning phase consisted of 6 learning blocks and two test phases. Participants were introduced to learning blocks 1-3, after which test phase 1 occurred, followed by learning blocks 4-6 and test phase 2. Due to the implicit learning nature of the CSWLT, participants were not informed of the transitions between learning blocks and test phases. The only information they received beforehand was that they were going to be introduced to a novel language called Kimenian. They were informed about the fact that they would be presented with 2 pictures each time, together with the orthographic and/or auditory representation of a Kimenian word (based on the sound or no-sound condition), after which they were expected to choose the corresponding picture. After the initial instructions, a short practice trial preceded the actual learning phase. Throughout the learning phase, participant had four opportunities to take a small break (unless they wished to proceed with the

experiment right away), which, however, did never co-occur with the start of a test phase. Furthermore, trials followed each other up with an interval of 2000ms, regardless of the participant selecting a picture or not.

Once the first part of the experiment was completed, participants continued with the first post-test: comprehension. It was explained to them that they would view a single picture each time together with 3 Kimenian words, of which one was a real Kimenian word and the remaining two non-existent. It was then up to the participants to choose the correct spelling based on the image. Again, a practice trial preceded to make the participants familiar with the task. Unlike for the learning phase, trials did not follow each other up automatically.

Participants were thus required to choose an answer but were able to decide their own pace. For the final part of the experiment, the second post-test (production), participants would be presented with individual pictures and were told to complete the Kimenian word by filling out the missing letters in the designated box. They were again given unlimited time to come up with their answers. Once having completed an item, the instruction was to press the ‘escape’ button to move onto the next trial.

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4.6 Analysis

4.6.1 Excluded Data

As the goal of the current study was to investigate whether adult native speakers of Dutch are able to acquire and apply the morpho-phonological and orthographic spelling rules of an artificial language as well as the ability to make the distinction and thus detect the rules behind the inanimate and animate items, the analysis focused on the outcomes of the

comprehension and production post-tests. Though the outcomes of the learning phase were taken into account with regards to exploratory questions, this task solely focused on exposure to Kimenian and not necessarily on the current study’s main aim, which is spelling. The comprehension and production post-tests, however, were concerned with the understanding and active reproduction of the spelling rules to which the participants had been introduced in the learning phase. Furthermore, though distinctive in nature, both post-tests were composed of similar design features, i.e. both had 16 trials and single picture stimuli, which allowed for a somewhat easier comparison of outcomes.

Additionally, it has to be mentioned that out of 49 participants, 4 were excluded from analysis. Two were excluded due to a lack of responses in the production task, one due to a technical error which caused the data set to be incomplete and the final one due to

consistently opting for the second orthographic representation throughout the entire comprehension task (out of option 1, 2 & 3). With regards to the latter, it was not clear whether the participant consciously made this decision or simply did not have a clue about what the possible answer could be. For the sake of statistical analysis, it was therefore decided not to include this participant. Lastly, due to an unexplainable cause, an additional participant was only given 14 trials for the comprehension task rather than the usual 15. Nonetheless, the participant did manage to complete the whole experiment and did not leave a single trial unanswered. For this reason, the participant was not excluded from the analysis.

4.6.2 General Scoring

The scoring for both the comprehension and production (as well as the learning) task were fairly similar. Out of 16 trials, 15 were used for the final analysis (i.e. minus the practice trial). For each trial, it was then possible for a participant to score a 1 or 0 based on a correct or incorrect answer. An answer was considered to be correct (1) when the target was chosen (i.e. choosing the correct spelling out of 3 options OR producing the correct orthographic

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form), whereas choosing or producing a non-target resulted in an incorrect answer (0). The CSWLT was created in such a way that for the learning and comprehension task, accuracy scores were automatically calculated. As this was not the case for the production task, accuracy scores were manually assigned based on what the participants responded, taking into account the animacy category of the picture and word stimuli presented in each trial.

4.6.3 Statistical Analysis: Main Effects, Exploratory Effects and Correlations

To answer the main research question, comprehension and production performances were assessed separately. Since the comprehension task was a 3-AFC, it was possible to perform a chance-level test. For the production task, however, as has been mentioned in section 4.3.3, no norm scores were available to decide the baseline. Therefore, it was only possible to analyze the descriptive statistics in terms of answering the research question, i.e. mean, standard deviations, percentage correct, animacy differences, type of mistakes. Animacy (within-subject) served as the main predictor to shed some light on the second research question. The within-subject predictor task, which is part of the current study’s exploratory findings, served to make a comparison of participants’ performances on

comprehension vs production. Not previously mentioned but possibly interesting, however, is the exploratory between-subject predictor modality, which relates to the sound vs no-sound condition. Conway & Christiansen (2005), for instance, found an advantage of auditory input over mere visual input during statistical learning. Therefore, modality was added for

exploratory purposes.

Using RStudio (version 1.1.419), the comprehension and production data were analyzed with general linear mixed-effects models that were built with the lme4 package (version 1.1-23). This was due to the binary nature of the outcome variable (i.e. accuracy 1 or 0) and the multiple measures per participant (15 trials). For all relevant analyses, the

categorical predictors of animacy, task and modality were coded into orthogonal contrasts. The predictor animacy was orthogonally coded into two contrasts: Animate (+ 0.5) and Inanimate (- 0.5), because previous literature has shown that people are better at learning animate rather than inanimate items. The exploratory predictors task and modality were binary in nature as well, resulting in the following contrasts based on predictions from previous studies: Comprehension (+ 0.5) and Production (- 0.5) for task (Gershkoff-Stowe & Hahn, 2013); No-sound (- 0.5) and Sound (+ 0.5) for modality (Conway & Christiansen, 2005). Table 2 provides an overview of the (main) predictors and their contrasts.

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Additionally, picture and word were both regarded as random factors. Since the same picture always belonged to the same word, statistical outcomes were not expected to differ significantly if either picture or word was left out. For the purpose of a complete analysis, however, both picture and word were included in the general linear mixed-effects models. Aside from these two factors, participant was considered a random factor as well. To perform the chance-level test, a separate model for the comprehension data excluding all predictors was generated. Predictors were excluded for this analysis since the outcome variable accuracy would be sufficient to assess the overall morpho-phonological and orthographic learning effect (refer back to RQ1). The final model, for which the comprehension and production data had to be combined, was run with all predictors and random factors, including all interactions between predictors to interpret the main and exploratory effects. Interactions included animacy x task, animacy x modality, task x modality and animacy x task x modality to explore all possible effects. Though these interactions are not specifically related to the research questions, the findings could prove to be interesting and could

potentially be investigated more in depth in future research.

Lastly, an additional Pearson correlation test was performed in RStudio between the total comprehension and production scores per participant to investigate whether 1)

participants who performed well on the comprehension task also performed well on the production task and the other way around, i.e. positive correlation 2) there is an opposite effect where people score well on one task and bad on the other, i.e. negative correlation. It was therefore necessary to compare participants’ total scores on both tasks. Separate files containing the raw data and detailed statistical analyses performed in RStudio can be accessed upon request.

Table 2 Orthogonal Contrast Coding of Categorical Predictors in the CSWLT

Predictor Contrast Coding Purpose

Animacy Animate: +0.5 Inanimate: -0.5 Confirmatory analysis of RQ 2 Task Comprehension: +0.5 Production: -0.5 Exploratory analysis Modality Sound: +0.5 No-sound: -0.5 Exploratory analysis

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5. Results 5.1 Post-test 1: Comprehension Outcomes

Table 3 provides an overview of the participants’ overall performances. Based on the outcomes of the 3-AFC task, a statistical chance-level test demonstrated that the Dutch participants had sufficient understanding of the morpho-phonological and orthographic properties of Kimenian to perform significantly above chance (estimated odds ratio = 1.695; 95% CI = 1.087...2.695; z = 2.361; p = 0.00016). Their overall accuracy was a total of 62.89% and thus significantly above the 33% baseline that was established to assess whether learning had occurred. This evidence is therefore sufficient to conclude that adult native speakers of Dutch are able to acquire the morpho-phonological and orthographic properties of Kimenian after only short exposure in the CSWLT.

Table 3 Accuracy Results of the CSWLT: Comprehension & Production

Comprehension Production

Total Correct

*All 45 participants combined

404 out of 675 items 268 out of 674 items

*Participant 31 received 14 trials instead of 15

Accuracy in % 62.89% 39.61%

Mean (μ) score 8.98 5.93

Standard Deviation (σ) 3.95 5.41

5.2 Post-test 2: Production Outcomes

Different from the comprehension data, it was not possible to perform any type of statistical analysis with regards to the participants’ accuracy. Table 3 therefore only illustrates their accuracy based on descriptive calculations (i.e. total correct/total number of items x 100). As there were no official norm scores available or instructions on how to approach these data statistically, the question of whether participants significantly acquired adequate knowledge about the morpho-phonological and orthographic properties of Kimenian to produce correct spelling patterns remains unanswered. It can only be assumed that an

accuracy of 39.61% is equivalent to an inadequate performance (supposing that, for instance, a passing score would equal at least an accuracy of 60% or 70%). Based on these descriptive outcomes, drawing any solid conclusions about the learning effect of adult native speakers of Dutch on this part of the CSWLT is therefore not possible.

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5.3 Comparing Comprehension and Production Performances

Based on the above-mentioned information, it becomes apparent that there is an absolute difference in participants’ performances when comparing the descriptive outcomes of the comprehension and production tasks. Please note, as was previously mentioned, that findings of two tasks with distinct designs should be interpreted with some caution as there might be other factors involved. Nevertheless, it is interesting to include an overview of the total scores per participant on each post-test to get an idea of how accuracy across tasks was divided for each participant (see Figure 2 below). As the Figure 2 demonstrates, the total scores varied per participant. Whereas some speakers of Dutch scored an identical or somewhat similar number of items correct on both comprehension and production (e.g. P1, P2 or P17), the majority of the participants had scores with extreme differences between comprehension and production. Obvious examples are P9 and P37, who performed well on comprehension but received hardly points for production.

Figure 2

Total Comprehension and Production Scores per Participant

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 P6 P7 P8 P9 _P10 _P11 _P12 _P13 _P14 _P15 _P16 _P17 _P18 _P19 _P20 _P21 _P22 _P23 _P24 _P25 _P26 _P27 _P28 _P29 _P30 _P31 _P32 _P33 _P34 _P35 _P36 _P37 _P38 _P39 _P40 _P41 _P42 _P43 _P44 _P45 Nu m be r of I te m s Co rr ec t Participant Comprehension Production

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5.4 Fixed Effects: Animacy, Task and Modality with Their Interactions

5.4.1 Main Effect: Animacy

The main effect of animacy proved to be significant, with an estimated odds ratio of 4.903, which is significantly greater than 1 (95% CI = 2.525... 9.522; z = 4.791; p =

0.0000017). However, contrary to previous findings, performance on inanimate items was significantly better than animate items throughout the whole experiment (see appendix C1 and C2 for an overview of the animacy scores per participant for each task). Taking into account the two different animacy categories, it might then prove useful to discuss the type of mistakes that participants made per category. Unfortunately, due to the inefficient way in which data was coded for the comprehension post-test, the current study was only able to analyze the production data in terms of mistakes and their frequency of occurrence.

As Figure 3 shows, most error types for both animate and inanimate items were categorized as Other. This category contained those mistakes that were not necessarily related to the morpho-phonological and orthographic spelling rules of Kimenian. For instance, those answers where only a /g/ was added to the inanimate stem nok (i.e. nokg instead of nokek) or those that left out two or more spelling properties for animate and inanimate items were categorized as such (e.g. animate: nag + /oer/ instead of nagarh, where both vowel harmony and the silent /h/ are absent). Looking at the mistakes in which only one

morpho-phonological or orthographic element was absent or used incorrectly, the absence of vowel harmony and the use of the inanimate spelling rule seemed to be the most prominent mistakes made for animate items (e.g. noesierh instead of noesoerh; kegek instead of kegerh).

Interesting to note, is the fact that a small group of participants consistently applied vowel harmony for each animate item but kept switching the /r/ and /h/, which resulted in words such as miepiehr and nomohr. This seems to point to difficulties they may have had in reproducing the /h/-spelling rule correctly at the end of the word. Similar to the mistakes made for animate items, common errors involving inanimate items were also concerned with vowel harmony. Participants tended to apply this morpho-phonological rule despite the fact that it was not inherent to inanimate items (e.g. farak instead of farek). Apart from the incorrect use of vowel harmony, however, participants interestingly added a silent /h/ to the /ek/ suffix in 17.4% of the cases (e.g. gutekh instead of gutek). This all seems to suggest that participants may have been aware of the morpho-phonological and orthographic rules to a certain extent but were not yet able to apply them in the correct context.

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5.4.2 Exploratory Effects: Task, Modality and Interactions

Task, which served as an exploratory effect, proved to be significant (estimated odds ratio = 4.969; 95% CI = 2.480...9.954; z = 4.615; p = 0.0000039). It can be concluded the participants in the current study were more likely to score correct on the comprehension rather than production aspect of the testing. This suggests that there is a comprehension-bias for adult speakers of Dutch who take part in the CSWLT. The exploratory effect of modality, however, turned out to be non-significant (estimated odds ratio = 0.989; z = -0.015; 95% CI = 0.239...4.089; p = 0.989). This immediately rules out the assumption that participants

presented with a sound or no-sound condition in the learning phase are significantly at an advantage or disadvantage during the post-tests of the CSWLT. Lastly, as far as the exploratory interactions between predictors are concerned, none of them proved to be

significant (see Table 4 below). Therefore, it cannot be concluded that an interplay of specific predictors had any notable effect on the accuracy of participants in the CSWLT.

5.5 Pearson Correlation of Task

To investigate whether performance on comprehension and production were positively correlated among the participants, a Pearson correlation test for task was performed in R. This resulted in an estimated correlation coefficient of +0.77, with a 95% confidence interval running from +0.616 to +0.868 (t = 7.922 p = 0.00000000061). The confidence interval does

How to read the animate error types: 1. Vowel harmony omitted 2. Silent /h/ omitted 3. /r/ omitted 4. Applying /ek/ 5. Other types of mistakes

How to read the inanimate error types: 1. Vowel harmony applied

2. Silent /h/ inserted 3. /r/ inserted

4. Applying vowel harmony + /r/ + /h/ 5. Other types of mistakes

Figure 3

Error Types for Animate and Inanimate Items with Their Absolute and Relative Frequencies

61.8% 14.7% 2.8% 2.8% 17.9% 67.1% 4.5% 0% 17.4% 11% 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 5. Other 4. Wrong rule 3. Missing /r/ 2. Silent /h/ 1. Vowel harmony Absolute Frequency Er ro r Ty pe Inanimate Animate

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not include zero, from which it can be derived that the comprehension and production task on the CSWLT were positively correlated within the adult Dutch participants. There is thus significant evidence that good performance on comprehension in the CSWLT equals a good performance on production as well as the reversed scenario (refer back to Figure 2).

Table 4 Statistical Outcomes of Interactions Between Predictors

Fixed Effect Est. odds ratio 95% CI z-value p-value

Animacy x Task 0.421 0.157…1.126 -1.759 0.078

Animacy x Modality 1.035 0.306…3.503 0.057 0.95

Task x Modality 0.908 0.263…3.136 -0.156 0.88

Animacy x Task x Modality 1.351 0.226…8.091 0.336 0.74

6. Discussion

6.1 Acquiring Morpho-phonological and Orthographic Spelling Rules

According to Zettersten et al. (2018), regularities in the shape of frequently co-occurring objects are assumed to be difficult to acquire due to the ambiguities that arise in a setting in which learners are required to map a word onto a referent. In the present study, this word-referent mapping was concerned with the mapping of morpho-phonological and

orthographic rules onto their corresponding referents. The main aim of the present study was therefore to assess whether adult native Dutch speakers were able to acquire the Kimenian spelling rules after a short period of exposure in a cross-situational learning setting. In

contrast to claims made about the difficulty of language learning in a cross-situational setting, statistical analysis indicated that participants performed significantly above chance when asked to identify the correct orthographic representation out of 3. What may be inferred from this is that the Dutch learners had an understanding of the spelling rules that are inherent to the Kimenian language, which can be translated into acquired knowledge of both the semantic (animate or inanimate) and grammatical (morpho-phonological; orthographic) properties that comprise animacy. This learning effect is in agreement with those found in previous studies on cross-situational learning (Yu & Smith, 2007; Monaghan et al., 2015;

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Zettersten et al., 2018) as well as prior literature on the statistical acquisition of morpho-phonology (Finley & Badecker, 2009) and orthography (Treiman & Kessler, 2006; Samara & Caravolas, 2014; Zhao et al., 2018). Ehri (2014) states that to be able to form connections and memorize words, one needs to be aware of the major grapheme-phoneme correspondences of a language’s writing system. Somewhat related to this and noteworthy to discuss, is the ability of the participants to identify the correct spellings of animate items, which included the additional /h/-suffix, the main orthographic element that did not correspond to any particular sound in the noun’s pronunciation (recall the learning phase with a sound vs no-sound condition). A question that arises then is what type of strategy the Dutch speakers could have used to memorize this rule. Treiman & Kessler (2006) and Zhao et al. (2018) have both investigated context-related strategies. According to these authors, context-consistency or sensitivity, e.g. knowing that in words like tone and bone or scone, the grapheme /e/ is silent but still orthographically represented, can be used as a strategy that may aid both

beginning and skilled spellers in selecting the appropriate orthographic forms. Additionally, it is assumed to be a strategy of which the benefits increase with experience, i.e. exposure upon exposure (Treiman & Kessler, 2006). Since the current study dealt with adults who may have had many prior experiences with utilizing contextual clues and statistical regularities, they might have applied such a strategy to the CSWLT as well. Based on this supposition, the multiple exposures to particular grapheme pairs (vowels and consonants) preceding the silent /h/ during the learning phase might then unconsciously have played an important role in their rule acquisition process. This, however, remains speculation since participants were not asked about any possible strategies they had used. Thus, though the CSWLT did not fully illuminate the type of underlying mechanisms that resulted in the found learning effect for comprehension, the Dutch natives had overall adequate abilities to exploit the orthographic regularities of the artificial language.

On a different note, Bernstein & Treiman (2001) and Treiman & Kessler (2006) emphasize the importance of a production task that asks participants to produce complete orthographic representations as it seems most suitable for examining an individual’s knowledge of the relationship between phonology on the one hand, and orthography on the other hand. Unfortunately, based on a lack of norm scores or baseline, the current study cannot make any solid claims about the participants’ (acquired) linguistic knowledge in connection to their ability to produce the correct orthographic forms. What these production results do show, however, is the fact that Dutch adults produced incorrect spellings for over

Animates vs Inanimates in Kimenian: An Analysis of Implicit Morpho-phonological and Orthographic Rule Learning in Adult Native Speakers of Dutch

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