What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd>lb). We demonstrate that such preferences modulate the perception of unattested onsets by English speakers: Monosyllabic auditory nonwords with onsets that are universally dispreferred (e.g., lbif) are more likely to be classified as disyllabic and misperceived as identical to their disyllabic counterparts (e.g., lebif) compared to onsets that are relatively preferred across languages (e.g., bdif). Consequently, dispreferred onsets benefit from priming by their epenthetic counterpart (e.g., lebif-lbif) as much as they benefit from identity priming (e.g., lbif-lbif). A similar pattern of misperception (e.g., lbif-->lebif) was observed among speakers of Russian, where clusters of this type occur. But unlike English speakers, Russian speakers perceived these clusters accurately on most trials, suggesting that the perceptual illusions of English speakers are partly due to their linguistic experience, rather than phonetic confusion alone. Further evidence against a purely phonetic explanation for our results is offered by the capacity of English speakers to perceive such onsets accurately under conditions that encourage precise phonetic encoding. The perceptual illusions of English speakers are also irreducible to several statistical properties of the English lexicon. The systematic misperception of universally dispreferred onsets might reflect their ill-formedness in the grammars of all speakers, irrespective of linguistic experience. Such universal grammatical preferences implicate constraints on language learning.     

Might-beliefs and asymmetric disagreement

Synthese - What we can call asymmetric disagreement occurs when one agent is in disagreement with another, but not vice-versa. In this paper, I give an example of and develop a framework for...     

What we know about what we have never heard before: Beyond phonetics : Reply to Peperkamp

Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, and Vaknin (2007) [Berent, I., Steriade, D., Lennertz, T., & Vaknin, V. (2007). What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions. Cognition, 104, 591-630] demonstrate that English speakers’ perception of onsets that are unattested in their language mirrors their typological markedness. We suggest that these findings might reflect the presence of universal grammatical constraints, a proposal challenged by Peperkamp’s commentary. Our reply exposes mischaracterizations of our claims and presents additional empirical arguments in their support.     

Evaluating the multiple proposition strategy

Contextualism about many expressions faces a common objection: in some discourses it appears that there is no single interpretation which can explain how a speaker is justified in making her assertion and how a hearer with different information or standards is justified in negatively evaluating what the speaker said. According to the Multiple Proposition Strategy, contextualists may attempt to explain these competing features pragmatically in terms of different propositions in play. In this paper I argue against the Multiple Proposition Strategy, first focusing on epistemic modals and then generalising the results to other expressions. I show how when purportedly contextualist terms are embedded in belief reports, we get similar problems but that the Multiple Proposition Strategy does not provide a satisfactory explanation of such cases. I suggest, therefore, that we reject the Multiple Proposition Strategy in favour of a theory that explains the unembedded and embedded cases in similar ways.