Rhythmic structure of word blends in English

Abstract

Word blends combine fragments from two words, either in speech errors or when a new word is created. Previous work has demonstrated that in Japanese, such blends preserve morale structure; in English they do not. A similar effect of moraic structure is observed in perceptual research on segmentation of continuous speech in Japanese; English listeners, by contrast, exploit stress units in segmentation, suggesting that a general rhythmic constraint may underlie both findings. The present study examined whether mis parallel would also hold for word blends. In spontaneous English polysyllabic blends, die source words were significantly more likely to be split before a strong than before a weak (unstressed) syllable, Le. to be split at a stress unit boundary. In an experiment in which listeners were asked to identify the source words of blends, significantly more correct detections resulted when splits had been made before strong syllables. Word blending, like speech segmentation, appears to be constrained by language rhythm.