In the Beginning There Were the Weird: A Phonotactic Novelty Preference in Adult Word Learning

It has been argued that words that contain difficultto-pronounce sound sequences may be avoided in production, causing words with difficult phonotactics to drop out of the language at a disproportionate rate. We argue that there is also an opposing pressure favoring phonetically unusual words. We show that, at least for adults, word learning is more successful for words with unfamiliar phonetic properties to the listener. After a ten minute ambiguous training session where two novel objects were presented with an audio recording of nonce words, subjects were tested on their memory of the creatures’ “names”. The results show a preference for words that contain illegal word-initial consonant clusters over words that obey the subjects’ native language phonotactics.