Accessibility of Place and Manner Features and the Place/Manner Dissimilation Principle in a Learning Task

Abstract

Alveolar, labial, fricative, and stop features were not readily accessible to adult subjects in a concept-formation task that involved learning a linguistic suffixing rule, even though the alveolar stop category triggers an alternate form of the English past tense suffix. However, the place/manner dissimilation principle was accessed toward the end of the testing session, suggesting that subjects encountered it as an articulatory constraint, as a result of pronouncing stimuli throughout the experiment. Speakers may process the past tense and plural suffixing rules in terms of articulatory constraints (i.e., possible and impossible pronunciation sequences), rather than in terms of segment or feature categories.