Abstract

This study presents empirical evidence that the accent patterns in novel words do not originate from analogy to phonetically similar familiar words. Rather, the accent pattern of novel words reflects statistical patterning in the lexicon. A corpus study showed that lexical distribution of North Kyungsang Korean (NKK) accent patterns is phonologically patterned: penultimate accent is common where all the syllables are light; final accent is more frequent where the final syllable is heavy. Lexical statistics revealed probabilistic structure-sensitive patterning in the lexicon even if exceptions obscure the patterning. This study will show that the accent patterns in novel words actually match this statistical patterning in the lexicon. This indicates that NKK speakers have implicit knowledge of the statistical patterning and apply it to novel words which lack lexical specification.

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