1 Two kinds of phonotactics I contrast the notions of “absolute phonotactics” and “comparative phonotactics.” Absolute phonotactics is the study of well-formedness in phonology. The topic has a long history, but was laid out with particular cogency by Chomsky and Halle (1965), who noted that speakers have phonotactic judgments even of words they have never heard before; thus blick [blɪk] is non...

Nine-month-old infants are already sensitive to the distinction between licit and illicit forms (Jusczyk et al. 1993). They thus display knowledge of the target adult phonotactics at an early stage when morphology is plausibly still lagging behind (Hayes 2004) and the acquisition of the native language lexicon has barely begun (Fenson et al. 1994). How can this early stage of the acquisition of...

This paper presents evidence from two experiments 1. that speakers of English use the phonotactics of English in analyzing speech input, and 2. that their phonotactic knowledge takes the form of categorical constraints stated in terms of phonological categories. Experimental results indicate that the phonotactic effect on ambiguous-segment perception is influenced by the relative markedness of ...

Previous research has demonstrated that increases in phonotactic probability facilitate spoken word processing, whereas increased competition among lexical representations is often associated with slower and less accurate recognition. We examined the combined effects of probabilistic phonotactics and lexical competition by generating words and nonwords that varied orthogonally on phonotactics a...

Clusters are described by phonotactics, which determines phonological conditions and constraints on the occurrence or co-occurrence of sounds in a given language (e.g., [pstr-] in Polish pstrąg ‘trout’, [-ps] in English lapse). Syllables, morphemes or words serve as domains of phonotactics. However, the functions of phonotactics – to achieve easily pronounceable and perceptable sequences – may ...

PHONOTACTICS Donca Steriade, UCLA Abstract Phonotactic statements characterize contextual restrictions on the occurrence of segments or feature values. This study argues that consonantal phonotactics are best understood as syllable-independent, string-based conditions reflecting positional differences in the perceptibility of contrasts. The analyses proposed here have better empirical coverage ...

The problem of the acquisition of phonotactics in Optimality Theory is intractable. This paper offers a way to cope with this hardness result: the problem is reformulated as a well known integer program (the Assignment problem with linear side constraints) paving the way for the application to phonotactics of approximation algorithms recently developed for integer programming. Knowledge of the ...

Abstract: The present study examined whether Cantonese-English bilingual listeners made use of their L1 probabilistic phonotactics in the segmentation process of English continuous speech (L2). Previous research in different languages demonstrated that probabilistic phonotactics could serve as a useful cue to locate the possible word boundary in continuous speech. The use of these kinds of info...

The present study attests the research question of whether native Chinese listeners are constrained by phonotactics information in the spoken word recognition processes using the word-spotting experiment. In the linguistic structure of Chinese, there are no legal consonant clusters occurred within each individual Chinese word, and this kind of phonotactics information of words may most likely c...