Gary S. Dell

Cynthia L. Fisher

Jennifer S. Cole

According to Gary Dell, he and his fellow linguistics and psycholinguistics researchers at the Beckman Institute have a motto.

“We claim that language learning never stops,” he said. “That’s our motto, that we’re constantly making small adjustments in the way that we understand and produce language to reflect our current circumstances.”

That may not seem like a controversial creed but it is one that goes against the grain of traditional thinking about the process of learning a language. Dell and fellow Biological Intelligence (BioIntel) research theme faculty members Jennifer Cole and Cynthia Fisher are among those whose work demonstrates this motto as they explore the theme of humans updating their grammatical knowledge over the lifespan. Cole is one of those in the field of linguistics who is challenging conventional thinking about language learning.

“For a long time linguists have thought that you acquired the basic grammatical knowledge of your language when you were a child and then by the time you hit puberty that knowledge is pretty much complete,” Cole said. “You may add new words but the structures are finished and then you just use them for the rest of your life.

“In recent years there has been increasing evidence that in fact we continue to update our grammatical knowledge. So our competence as speakers of a language, the knowledge that we have that allows us to communicate with language, is continuously changing, and reflecting our experience as we use the language – as we speak and as we listen.”

Cole is a professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois while Dell and Fisher are professors of psychology. The three are currently collaborating on a project involving perception and production in the domain of phonology, which refers to how the sounds of language are put together to form words. The project investigates an aspect of the phonological processing system called phonotactic constraints, which are language specific generalizations about how words are pronounced.

Cole’s role in the project is focused on linguistic analysis and speech perception experiments, while Dell concentrates on speech production and computational modeling, and Fisher on speech production and the studies involving children.

The research line is demonstrating that language learning is an ongoing process that, as the researchers have written, “adapts to recent experience, while continuing to reflect the accumulated experience of a lifetime of speaking and listening.” Their research is showing that phonotactic constraints can be changed, to a large extent in fact, by experience.

Dell said their projects involving phonotactic patterns incorporate experiments that look at language production, language perception, and language and infants.

“In all of those experiments what we are studying is the learning of what are called phonotactic patterns, meaning how the sounds of language are put together to form words,” Dell said. “For example, in English the “ng” sound only occurs at the ends of syllables, so we say sing, but we would never reverse that. It sounds weird. The fact that it sounds weird to you reflects your knowledge of phonotactics.