The representation of consonant clusters in the mental lexicon

Abstract

Previous work has shown that the perception of a phoneme in a syllable is influenced by the number of similar sounding words [lexical neighborhood (Newman, Sawusch, and Luce, 1997)]. This previous work determined neighborhoods for target syllables using a one phoneme change rule. For example, bow, bath and mouth are neighbors of bowth. The present work focused on how consonant clusters are represented in the mental lexicon. Nonsense syllables composed of initial consonant clusters followed by a vowel and final consonant were used as stimuli. Two rules were used to compute the neighborhood for each target syllable. One was the one phoneme change rule used in previous studies. The second treated clusters of consonants as single units in a one unit change rule. Target syllables with differential neighborhoods based on the two rules were the endpoints of the test series. Results to date agree with the one phoneme change rule. These results are consistent with models of word recognition which treat consonant c...