L1 phonotactic knowledge and the L2 acquisition of alternations

Phonological alternations often serve to modify forms so that they respect a phonotactic restriction that applies across the words of language. Although it has long been assumed that an adequate theory of phonology should capture the connection between phonotactics and alternations, there is no psycholinguistic evidence that speakers actually do use a single mechanism for them both. In this study, we used an artificial language learning experiment with adult subjects to test whether an alternation that meets a phonotactic target is easier to learn than one that does not. The results suggest that phonotactic knowledge does aid in the acquisition of alternations, and also provide a novel example of the influence of the first language on second language learning.