Frequency of Consonant Clusters

Bibliographic Data

ID2905722
AuthorsSol Saporta (corresponding author)
Year1955
Volume31
Issue1
Pages25
Publication date1955-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/410889
OpenAlexW2329194090
LanguageEN
Citations received12

The psycholinguistic approach to certain linguistic phenomena is based on two general assumptions, which most structural linguists would probably accept but would probably consider irrelevant: first, that language as a form of learned behavior is subject to the general principles which govern all learned behavior; second, that to determine what these principles are and how they function, the relative frequency of phenomena may be significant. In his description of the phonology of a language, the structural linguist has usually limited his analysis to a presentation of those sequences of phonemes which occur in a language, without noting the relative frequencies of these combinations. It is true that several studies have offered systematic statements of distribution and clustering, pointing out for example that in English a phone of the /ŋ/ phoneme does not appear in word-initial position, or that /str-/ is an initial cluster but /sθr-/ is not. But the greater-than-chance occurrence of some sequences and the less-than-chance occurrence of others has usually gone unmentioned. The contribution of a psycholinguistic analysis is to suggest that these deviations from chance are not random, but are governed by some ‘lawful’ principle

Consonant · Consonant cluster · Linguistics · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology

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