Learning artificial phonotactic constraints: time course, durability, and relationship to natural constraints.

G. S. Dell, K. D. Reed, D. R. Adams, and A. S. Meyer (2000) proposed a "breadth-of-constraint" continuum on phoneme errors, using artificial experiment-wide constraints to investigate a putative middle ground between local and language-wide constraints. The authors report 5 experiments that test the idea of the continuum and the location of the experiment-wide constraints within it. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the findings of Dell et al. on the experiment-wide constraints but showed only chance adherence to the local positional constraints. Experiment 3 showed that the latter constraints are uniquely affected by the form of practice used. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated the time course and robustness of the experimental constraints by reversing them during testing. This caused no difficulty when occurring between blocks (Experiment 4) but caused short-lived disruption when occurring within block (Experiment 5). The authors propose that the results do not support the idea of a continuum, but that the experiment-wide constraints reflect a local biasing of language-wide constraints, probably related to the need for rapid learning.