Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the frequency with which segments and sequences of segments occur in syllables and words. Knowledge of phonotactics has been shown to be an important source of information in segmenting and recognizing speech in normal hearing listeners. A post-perceptual task (nonword rating) and two on-line tasks (an auditory same-different and an auditory lexical decision...

This study presents an overview of the different strategies that Persian learners of English employ to deal with initial clusters. While vowel epenthesis appears to be the most widespread repair strategy to conform such clusters to Persian phonotactics, the location of the epenthetic vowel varies. In this paper, we investigate two approaches that seek to explain the epenthetic site. The first o...

A search technique incorporating the automatic modeling of lexical variability is introduced for medium or large-vocabulary speaker-independent speech recognition. Current state-of-art systems depend on being able to model the entire language based on acoustic features and the constraints of syntax or interword probabilities. These methods often fail in the presence of multiple speakers, new vo...

A series of three experiments examined children's sensitivity to probabilistic phonotactic structure as reflected in the relative frequencies with which speech sounds occur and co-occur in American English. Children, ages 212 and 312 years, participated in a nonword repetition task that examined their sensitivity to the frequency of individual phonetic segments and to the frequency of combinati...

Experimental work has established that when subjects judge the phonological wellformedness of nonsense forms, they are strongly affected by the frequency of the phonological elements of the form and by the number of actual words that such a form is similar to. These results challenge phonological theory by suggesting a central role for frequency and the lexicon. In this paper, I review these re...

In typical forms of derived environment blocking, restrictions on segment sequences within a prosodic domain are weakened when the same segments span a prosodic juncture. In this paper, I argue that these patterns are accounted for by indexing markedness constraints to the spans of prosodic constituents. By setting domains for phonotactic restrictions, these prosodically-indexed constraints acc...

Three experiments addressed the hypothesis that production factors constrain phonotactic learning in adult English speakers, and that this constraint gives rise to a markedness effect on learning. In Experiment 1, an acoustic measure was used to assess consonant-consonant coarticulation in naturally produced nonwords, which were then used as stimuli in a phonotactic learning experiment. Results...

The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster, where the second member of the cluster is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighborhood density. The experiment also shows that t...

Abstract This paper investigates the historical loss of root-initial consonants, using a case study Middle Paman languages Cape York Peninsula, in northeastern Australia. Systematic initial consonants is typologically unusual phenomenon, mainly found Australia, that has often been regarded as starting point for far-reaching changes root structure, phonotactics and even phoneme inventory. So far...