Abstract
Syllable well-formedness judgment experiments reveal that speakers exhibit gradient judgment on novel words, and the gradience has been attributed to both grammatical factors and lexical statistics (e.g., Coetzee, 2008). This study investigates gradient phonotactics stemming from the violations of four types of grammatical constraints in Mandarin Chinese: 1) principled phonotactic constraints, 2) accidental phonotactic constraints, 3) allophonic restrictions, and 4) segmental-tonal cooccurrence restrictions. A syllable well-formedness judgment experiment was conducted with native Mandarin speakers to examine how the grammatical and lexical statistics factors contribute to the variation in phonotactic acceptability judgment.
Highlights
The study of phonotactics investigates the permissibility of sound combinations in a language
Our results showed that allophonic gaps that can be fixed as real words are more acceptable than those that are fixed as tonal gaps (t(1198) = 4.4219, p < .0001), suggesting an additive effect between the violations of allophonic restrictions and segmental-tonal co-occurrence restrictions
Using syllable well-formedness judgment as the experimental paradigm, this study explores the nature of Mandarin speakers’ non-word acceptability judgment
Summary
The study of phonotactics investigates the permissibility of sound combinations in a language. Acceptability judgments for nonexistent forms often serve as a proxy for the phonotactic grammar as they provide data about how native speakers generalize beyond linguistic forms they previously encountered (Myers, 2017; Sprouse, 2018). Results from these judgment tasks have shown that speakers possess phonotactic knowledge and use such knowledge to offer gradient acceptability ratings on novel words. Using data from a syllable well-formedness judgment experiment, this paper explores the nature of gradient phonotactic acceptability in Mandarin, a language with considerably less complex syllable structure and phonotactics than English. The results showed that, in Mandarin, phonotactic judgment is gradient, and the gradience is mainly explained by a number of grammatical factors such as principled phonotactic constraints, allophonic restrictions, and syllable-tone co-occurrence patterns
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