When
Gary Dell
Professor Emeritus
Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The adaptable speaker: A theory of implicit learning in language production
Abstract: Sigmund Freud and Joe Biden are famous for slips of the tongue, Biden because people believe he often makes them, and Freud because he thought people like Biden are revealing their unconscious state when they slip. In thinking this, Freud was right in at least one respect: Speech errors do reveal something about the speaker's unconscious - their implicit knowledge of the sound patterns of their language. For example, Biden and all English speakers implicitly know that you cannot begin a syllable with the "ng" sound. And one's slips "know" this fact, too. An English speaker might say "hangmang" instead of "hangman," but would never say "ngangman." Because other languages do allow "ng" syllable onsets, we can conclude that the English speaker's belief that "ng" cannot be an onset is the result of learning.
This talk will show that this kind of learning can be altered in the laboratory and that slip behavior will change accordingly. If speakers produce syllables in the lab in which /f/ only occurs in syllable onsets, their slips will follow this new rule. The speakers have implicitly learned a new sound pattern. I will review a number of phenomena related to this finding and suggest a new theory of implicit learning in language production. The talk will touch on two important aspects of the learning of sound patterns, first, that children are more successful than adults, and second, that learning sound patterns, like many other kinds of learning, may benefit from consolidation during sleep.