Can you judge what you don’t hear? Perception as a source of gradient wordlikeness judgements

Abstract

A key observation about wordlikeness judgements, going back to some of the earliest work on the topic is that they are gradient in the sense that nonce words tend to form a cline of acceptability. In recent years, such gradience has been modelled as stemming from a gradi­ent phonotactic grammar or from a lexical similarity effect. In this article, we present two experiments that suggest that at least some of the observed gradience stems from gradience in perception. More generally, the results raise the possibility that the gradience observed in wordlikeness tasks may not come from a gradient phonotactic/phonological grammar.