Do we have innate knowledge about phonological markedness? Comments on Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, and Vaknin.

In their article ‘What we know about what we have never heard: Evidence from perceptual illusions’, Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, and Vaknin (2007) address the question of whether listeners have innate knowledge of phonological markedness. Focusing on sonority and syllable structure, they answer this question positively. SpeciWcally, they argue that English listeners’ perception of onset clusters is reXected by the markedness of these clusters. Their reasoning is as follows. On the basis of typological facts, onset clusters with a sonority rise (such as /bn/, /b/ being less sonorous than /n/) are said to be universally less marked than those with a sonority plateau (such as /bd/), which are in turn less marked than those with a sonority fall (such as /lb/). Using three diVerent tasks – syllable judgment, discrimination, and lexical decision – the authors show that the more an onset cluster is marked, the more likely it is perceived with an illusory epenthetic vowel by English listeners. English words do not contain any of the onset cluster types used in the experiments; hence, this