The psychological reality of sonority in English

Abstract

A long-standing controversy in the interface between phonology and other disciplines involves the nature of sonority. This paper seeks to help resolve this issue by showing that the sonority hierarchy is psychologically real to native speakers of English. This is accomplished by reporting the results of a rigorous and in-depth psycholinguistic experiment involving a common process of playful reduplication. A list of 99 hypothetical rhyming pairs such as roshy-toshy was evaluated by 332 subjects. Their task was to judge which order sounds more natural, e.g., roshy-toshy or toshy-roshy. The data confirm the crucial importance of sonority in accounting for the observed results. Specifically, the unmarked (preferred) pattern is for the morpheme beginning with the more sonorous segment in each pair to occur in absolute word-initial position. A generalized version of the Syllable Contact Law is utilized in a brief formal analysis of this phenomenon.