General Purpose Cognitive Processing Constraints and Phonotactic Properties of the Vocabulary

Properties of phonological systems may derive from both comprehension and production constraints. In this study, we test the extent to which general purpose constraints from sequence production are manifested in repetitions of phonemes within words. We find that near repetitions of phonemes occur less than expected by chance within the vocabularies of four studied languages: Dutch, English, French and German. This is consistent with constraints on response suppression effects in short term sequence production and with the principle of “similar place avoidance”, but inconsistent with theories of consonant harmony derived from formalisation of co-articulation of phonemes in speech.