Emergent positional privilege in novel English blends

Abstract

We present evidence from experiments on novel blend formation showing that adult English speakers have access to constraints that give phonological privilege to heads, nouns, and proper nouns, even though the nonblend phonology provides no evidence that such constraints are generally active in the grammar of English. Our results (i) demonstrate that these positional constraints are universally available; (ii) confirm that the lexical category ‘proper noun’ has the status of a strong position, which has broader implications for the role of lexical categories in positional privilege effects; and (iii) confirm that strong positions based on salience from nonphonetic sources (such as morphosyntactic, semantic, or psycholinguistic salience) participate in position-specific phonological phenomena.