Diachronic dynamics of Middle English phonotactics provide evidence for analogy effects among lexical and morphonotactic consonant clusters

Homophonous phonotactic and morphonotactic consonant clusters in word-final position

Morphonotactic clusters are defined as combinations of phonemes across morpheme boundaries. As they are cognitively processed faster and acquired earlier than phonotactic clusters, it is hypothesised that in speech production, morphonotactic clusters are more robust and highlighted than phonotactic clusters. The aim of this study was to compare homophonous phonotactic and morphonotactic consona...

Optimality Theoretic Account of Acquisition of Consonant Clusters of English Syllables by Persian EFL Learners*

This study accounts for the acquisition of the consonant clusters of English syllable structures both in onset and coda positions by Persian EFL learners. Persian syllable structure is "CV(CC)", composed of one consonant at the initial position and two optional consonants at the final position; whereas English syllable structure is "(CCC)V(CCCC)". Therefore, Persian EFL learners need to resolve...

Positional effects in consonant clusters

Investigating phonotactics, lexical analogy, and sound symbolism using xenolinguistics: A novel word-picture matching paradigm

All human languages have restrictions on sound sequences, called phonotactic constraints. Knowledge of phonotactic constraints is typically tested using pseudoword rating tasks, e.g., an English speaker might be asked to rate acceptability or wordlikeness of the phonotactically illegal /bnɪk/ and the phonotactically legal /blɪk/. We introduce a new method of testing knowledge of phonotactic con...

The Effect of Consonant Clusters on Vowel Duration in English

This study examines the effect of word-final consonant clusters on vowel duration in English. The duration of the high front lax vowel [,] was measured with respect to 64 different word-final consonant sequences of one, two, and three segments in length. A set of 960 [t,C(C)(C)] words were produced by three speakers and analysed. In accordance with previous studies, it was found that both voici...