KUPPL
The University of Kansas
15 Blake Hall
Lawrence, KS 66045-3129
Phone: 785-864-3414
Fax: 785-864-5724
|
|
Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research, Vol 19, No. 6, 1990 pp. 387-404.
Phonological
and Form Class Relations in the Lexicon
Joan A.
Sereno and Allard Jongman
| Two experiments were
conducted to examine the structure of the mental lexicon. A lexical search
of American English, using the Brown corpus (Francis and Kucera, 1982),
revealed a skewed, frequency-dependent distribution in which the syntactic
classes of noun and verb are distinguished in terms of the phonological
classification of their vowels. Among high-frequency words, nouns are more
likely to have back vowels (57%) rather than front vowels (43%) and verbs
more likely to have front vowels (62%) than back vowels (38%). This distribution,
however, does not hold for low-frequency nouns and verbs in the language.
Noun and verb stimuli containing front and back vowels were examined in
both an auditory noun/verb categorization task and an auditory lexical decision
task. In general, the phonotactic composition of nouns and verbs in the
lexicon was shown to have perceptual consequences. Listeners seem to be
differentially sensitive to incoming sound patterns on the basis of distributional
properties of the lexicon. |
|
|
