LEXICAL AND PHONOTACTIC EFFECTS ON WORDLIKENESS JUDGMENTS IN CANTONESE

James Kirby1 & Alan C. L. Yu2
1Phonology Laboratory, University of Chicago; 2Phonology Laboratory, University of Chicago

ID 1125
[full paper]

This paper reports the results of a wordlikeness task designed to investigate Cantonese speakers’ gradient phonotactic knowledge of systematic versus accidental phonotactic gaps. Regression analyses found that wordlikeness judgments correlate with token frequency-weighted neighborhood density and transitional (bigram) probability.This is suggested to be an effect of the relative phonological densities of the Cantonese and English lexica.