Chunking of phonological units in speech sequencing.

ABSTRACT: Efficient speech communication requires rapid, fluent production of phoneme sequences. To achieve this, our brains store frequently occurring subsequences as cohesive "chunks" that reduce phonological working memory load and improve motor performance. The current study used a motor-sequence learning paradigm in which the generalization of two performance gains (utterance duration and errors) from practicing novel phoneme sequences was used to infer the nature of these speech chunks. We found that performance improvements in duration from practicing syllables with non-native consonant clusters largely generalized to new syllables that contained those clusters. Practicing the whole syllable, however, resulted in larger performance gains in error rates compared to practicing just the consonan

SUBMITTER: Segawa J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6686190 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature