Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities.
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.
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, CNRS, EHESS), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France; School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Electronic address: isabelle.dautriche@gmail.com.
Isabelle
I
Dautriche
Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, United States. Electronic address: kylemaho@mit.edu.
Kyle
K
Mahowald
Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, United States.
Edward
E
Gibson
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, CNRS, EHESS), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France.
Anne
A
Christophe
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, United States.
Steven T
ST
Piantadosi
D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary
Communication; Lexical design; Linguistics; Phonotactics