Paper
Authors: Shiying Yang (Brown University) , Chelsea Sanker (Brown University) , Uriel Cohen Priva (Brown University)
Lexicons utilize a fraction of licit structures. Different theories predict either that lexicons prioritize contrastiveness or structural economy. Study 1 finds that the monosyllabic lexicon of Mandarin is no more distinctive than a randomly sampled baseline using the phonological inventory. Study 2 finds that the lexicons of Mandarin and American English have fewer phonotactically complex words than the random baseline: Words tend not to have multiple low-probability components. This suggests that phonological constraints can have superadditive penalties for combined violations, consistent with e.g. Albright (ms.).
Keywords: phonotactics, lexicon, superadditivity, dispersion, phonological distance
How to Cite: Yang, S. , Sanker, C. & Cohen Priva, U. (2018) “The Organization of Lexicons: a Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Monosyllabic Words”, Society for Computation in Linguistics. 1(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/R58P5XPZ