{"pk":49580,"title":"The Impact of Similar Place Avoidance on Novel Word Learning in Adults","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Similar Place Avoidance (SPA) is the cross-linguistic tendency whereby languages avoid transvocalic consonants with the same place of articulation within a word. In this study, we examine if SPA is the result of learning biases against words where the consonants share a place of articulation. In two experiments we examine whether adults show a learning difference between place-disagreeing novel words (e.g. [tip]) and place-agreeing novel words (e.g. [tid], where [t] and [d] are coronal). Participants are taught novel words and are then tested in an object-mapping or lexical decision task. We measure participants' learning performance based on accuracy and reaction times. Results indicate that, while accuracy is comparable for place-agreeing and place-disagreeing words in both tasks, participants' lexical decision responses are generally slower for place-agreeing words. These results suggest that participants experience processing difficulties when accessing newly-formed representations of place-agreeing words, which may contribute to the existence of SPA.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Learning; Phonology"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9zp1668q","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Annie","middle_name":"","last_name":"Holtz","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Kenny","middle_name":"","last_name":"Smith","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Mitsuhiko","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ota","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49580/galley/37542/download/"}]}