Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Phonotactic and orthotactic constraints determine the possible spoken and written sequences of a language. Adult speakers quickly learn simple new phonotactic rules, but they only learn the more complex second-order rules (e.g., “/k/ is an onset only if the vowel is /æ/, but a coda if the vowel is /ɪ/”) after the first day of training, whereas children learn the same rules on the first day. In this study, we first show that adults learn simple new rules of sequencing in typing as quickly as in speaking. We then show that, despite a much higher error rate and opportunities for error-based learning, the timeline for learning the second-order rules in typing is similar to speaking. Finally, we demonstrate that what is learned in a second-order rule, as in the example above, is the coda —and not the onset— constraint, pointing to a chaining-type mechanism for learning new rules of sequencing. Keywords: orthotactic constraints; language production; typing; statistical learning