Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities

Isabelle Dautriche, Kyle Mahowald, Edward Gibson, Anne Christophe, Steven T. Piantadosi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion). On the other hand, a lexicon with high phonological regularity would be simpler to learn, remember and produce (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011) (a pressure for clumpiness). Here we investigate wordform similarity in the lexicon, using measures of word distance (e.g., phonological neighborhood density) to ask whether there is evidence for dispersion or clumpiness of wordforms in the lexicon. We develop a novel method to compare lexicons to phonotactically-controlled baselines that provide a null hypothesis for how clumpy or sparse wordforms would be as the result of only phonotactics. Results for four languages, Dutch, English, German and French, show that the space of monomorphemic wordforms is clumpier than what would be expected by the best chance model according to a wide variety of measures: minimal pairs, average Levenshtein distance and several network properties. This suggests a fundamental drive for regularity in the lexicon that conflicts with the pressure for words to be as phonologically distinct as possible. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)128-145
Number of pages18
JournalCognition
Volume163
Early online date22 Mar 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2017

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • communication
  • lexical design
  • linguistics
  • phonotactics

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