Phonotactic probabilities in Italian simplex and complex words: a fragment priming study

Phonotactics refers to the sequential organization of phonological units that are legal in a language (Crystal 1992). However, legal sound sequences do not all occur with the same probability in a language. Phonotactic probability is most often measured in terms of transitional probabilities (TPs) of biphones and has been shown to influence a large range of processes, including infants’ discrimination of native language sounds, adults’ ratings of the wordlikeness of nonwords (Vitevitch et al. 1997), speech segmentation (Pitt & McQueen 1998, Mattys & Jusczyk 2001), word acquisition (Storkel 2001) and recognition (Luce & Large 2001). Specifically, in the domain of word recognition, high TPs facilitate word and nonword identification in speeded same-different matching tasks, but slow down identification in lexical decision tasks due to the inhibitory effects of a large neighborhood (e.g. Vitevitch & Luce 1999, Luce & Large 2001). Most of the studies on the role of TPs in speech production and perception have been conducted on English. In this paper we focus on the role of phonotactic probabilities in priming morphologically simplex and complex words in Italian. We investigate whether biphone TPs affect the recognition of word targets after exposure to fragment primes differing in the probability with which the fragment-final consonant predicts the consecutive segment in the target. We opted for a non-factorial, regression design including lexical and sub-lexical frequency and distributional variables as predictors (see Baayen 2010). In this paper, we report on the results of the study on simplex words only; we however discuss the implications of the current findings for the processing of complex words.