The contribution of consonants and vowels in spoken word processing has been widely investigated, and studies have found a phenomenon of a Consonantal bias (C-bias), indicating that consonants carry more weight than vowels. However, across languages, various patterns have been documented, including that of no preference or a reverse pattern of Vowel bias. A central question is how the manifestation of the C-bias is modulated by language-specific factors. This question can be addressed by cross-linguistic studies. Comparing native Hebrew and native English speakers, this study examines the relative importance of transitional probabilities between non-adjacent consonants as opposed to vowels during auditory statistical learning (SL) of an artificial language. Hebrew is interesting because its complex Semitic morphological structure has been found to play a central role in lexical access, allowing us to examine whether morphological properties can modulate the C-bias in early phases of speech perception, namely, word segmentation. As predicted, we found a significant interaction between language and consonant/vowel manipulation, with a higher performance in the consonantal condition than in the vowel condition for Hebrew speakers, namely, C-bias, and no consonant/vowel asymmetry among English speakers. We suggest that the observed interaction is morphologically anchored, indicating that phonological and morphological processes interact during early phases of auditory word perception.

中文翻译：

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语言特定属性对人工语言统计学习任务中辅音和元音作用的影响：跨语言比较

辅音和元音在口语文字处理中的贡献已被广泛研究，研究发现了辅音偏差（C-bias）现象，表明辅音比元音更重要。然而，在各种语言中，已经记录了各种模式，包括无偏好或元音偏向的反向模式。一个核心问题是 C 偏差的表现如何受到语言特定因素的调节。这个问题可以通过跨语言研究来解决。本研究比较了以希伯来语和英语为母语的人，研究了在人工语言的听觉统计学习 (SL) 过程中，非相邻辅音与元音之间的转换概率的相对重要性。希伯来语很有趣，因为它复杂的闪米特形态结构被发现在词汇访问中发挥着核心作用，使我们能够检查形态属性是否可以调节语音感知早期阶段（即分词）的 C 偏差。正如预测的那样，我们发现语言和辅音/元音操作之间存在显着的相互作用，对于希伯来语使用者来说，辅音条件下的性能高于元音条件下的性能，即 C 偏差，并且英语使用者中没有辅音/元音不对称性。我们认为观察到的相互作用是形态锚定的，表明语音和形态过程在听觉单词感知的早期阶段相互作用。