Abstract
The psychological reality of an abstract consonant dissimilation constraint is demonstrated in an experiment with native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. In this experiment, novel verbs containing constraint violations and those without violations were presented orthographically for judgments of well-formedness. Native speaker well-formedness judgments reflected knowledge of the phonotactic constraint. Systematic gaps were rated much less wordlike than accidental gaps that were equivalent in their lexical characteristics. Judgments for novel verbs containing constraint violations were also gradiently influenced by consonant pair similarity. The experimental study supports previous dictionary-based phonotactic analyses that propose that the native speaker's knowledge of consonant cooccurrence constraints in Arabic is based on emergent generalizations over the lexical items in an abstract root lexicon.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.