A consonantal bias in the process of learning artificial words by Hebrew speakers: evidence from the visual world paradigm

This research investigates the role of consonants and vowels in learning the phonological form and meanings of artificial words. Participants learned to map artificial words to meaningless shapes. The visual world paradigm was applied, where eye movements are recorded while participants chose a target shape denoted by a spoken name. The target was presented along with a competitor shape, whose name was similar to the target's name in its consonantal or vocalic structure. Participants' performance was better for targets that differed from competitors in their consonantal rather than in their vocalic structure, suggesting that the consonantal structure is more important than vowels (Consonantal-bias) in acquiring new words' meaning. These results extend previous research in Hebrew that revealed a C-bias in other aspects of auditory perception, and accords with our claim that the C-bias in Hebrew reflects Hebrew's morphological structure, which partially overlaps with the phonological distinction between consonants and vowels.