Phonological and form class relations in the lexicon

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.These experiments were conducted at the Brown University Phonetics Laboratory. The technical expertise of John Mertus and Andrew Mackie as well as the help of Martha Burton and Annemie Witjes are gratefully acknowledged.