Phonetic Interpretation Papers in Laboratory Phonology VI: Speech perception, well-formedness and the statistics of the lexicon

TLDR: Results indicate that speakers generalise over the entries in their lexicons, and respond differently to patterns which are exemplified versus ones which are not, which raises the question of whether knowledge of phonotactics is categorical, distinguishing only possible from impossible forms, or whether it is gradient, tracking lexical statistics more.

Abstract: The speech literature abounds in evidence that language-specific phonotactic patterns affect perception. Phonotactics affect placement of phoneme category boundaries (Massaro and Cohen 1983), segmentation of nonce forms (Suomi et al. 1997), and speed and accuracy of phoneme monitoring (Otake et al. have provided evidence that perceived well-formedness of phoneme combinations is related to their frequency in the language. Coleman (1996) also found that speakers rated neologisms with attested clusters higher than those containing unattested clusters. These results indicate that speakers generalise over the entries in their lexicons, and respond differently to patterns which are exemplified versus ones which are not. However, patterns may be exemplified to different degrees. This raises the question of whether knowledge of phonotactics is categorical, distinguishing only possible from impossible forms (as predicted by classical generative models), or whether it is gradient, tracking lexical statistics more