Abstract
This study analyzed the syllable-based phonological neighborhood networks (PNNs) of Korean words. The network-theoretic representation of the lexicon has provided new insights on cross-linguistic and language particular factors in the composition of the phonological lexicon (Vitevitch, 2008; Shoemark et al., 2016, among others). This study draws from the literature the notion of phonological similarity as a network feature, but, unlike previous phonemic approaches, it assumes syllables as the unit of phonological similarity (Mehler et al., 1981; Kwon et al., 2006, 2011). We collected 83,881 polysyllabic words from a Korean corpus. According to the various network measurements on them, the syllable-based PNNs were similar to conventional phonemic-based PNNs in satisfying requirements for small-world networks, being influenced by the lexicon size and having a high value of assortativity by degree. However, they also showed different characteristics from phoneme-based PNNs: syllable-based PNNs had larger giant clusters, average degrees, and cluster coefficients, and they showed smaller values of the average shortest path length. The insights from the PNN analysis are significant since they can help answer empirical questions of phonological word processing and word acquisition.
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