Franco, A. 1, 2 , Bertels, J. 1, 2 & Kolinsky, R. . 1, 2
1 Université Libre de Bruxelles
2 Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences
Consonants and vowels play distinct roles during language processing. While consonants are preferentially involved in lexical processing, vowels tend to mark syntactic constituency through prosodic cues. In this view, recent research on statistical learning of artificial languages has demonstrated that consonants support statistical computations, whereas vowels allow some structural generalizations. Nevertheless, these asymmetries could be by-products of literacy acquisition, more specifically of the development of metalinguistic skills such as phonological awareness.
To examine the latter idea, adults and preschool children (4 year-olds) participated to two experimental sessions in which they learned two artificial languages presented auditorily in the form of continuous speech streams. In one language the statistical information consisted in the transitional probabilities (TPs) between consonants; in the other, it consisted in the TPs between vowels. Moreover, phonological awareness skills were assessed for pre-schoolers by means of two different tasks (phoneme and syllable deletion and phonemic sensibility). Results will be presented at the conference.