Introduction
Speakers learn to speak by listening. But how do acts of
speech perception lead to change within the production
system? Our ability to speak depends on the acquisition
of general patterns such as the fact that, in English, adjec-
tives precede nouns or that one says ‘‘an” before words
beginning with vowels. This paper is concerned with
perception-to-production transfer of a specific kind of gen-
eralization, phonotactic constraints. Phonotactics are con-
straints about the ordering of segments, typically within
syllables. They are language specific and hence must be
learned. For example, in English, /h/ must be a syllable
onset (occur at the beginning of a syllable, e.g. /hum/)
and /ng/ must be a syllable coda (occur at the end of a