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Crosslinguistic evidence for a strong statistical universal: Phonological neutralization targets word-ends over beginnings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Andrew Wedel,
Adam Ussishkin and
Adam King
Andrew Wedel*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
Adam Ussishkin*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
Adam King*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
*
[wedel@email.arizona.edu]
[ussishki@email.arizona.edu]
[adamking@email.arizona.edu]
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Abstract

We report a statistical test of a long-standing hypothesis in the literature: that phonological neutralization rules are more common at the ends of lexical domains than the beginnings (Houlihan 1975 et seq.). We collected descriptive grammars for an areally and genetically diverse set of fifty languages, identified all active phonological rules that target the edge of a lexical domain (root, stem, word, phrase, or utterance), and further coded each rule for whether it was phonemically neutralizing, that is, able to create surface homophony. We find that such neutralizing rules are strongly, significantly less common at the beginnings of lexical domains relative to ends, and that this pattern is strikingly consistent across all languages within the data set. We show that this pattern is not an artifact of a tendency for syllable codas to be a target for phonological neutralization, nor is it associated with a suffixing or prefixing preference. Consistent with previous accounts, we argue that this pattern may ultimately be based in the greater average information content of phonological categories early in the word, which itself is a consequence of incremental processing in lexical access.

Keywords

phonologytypologyneutralizationlexical processing

Information

Type
Research Report
Information
Language , Volume 95 , Issue 4 , December 2019, pp. e428 - e446
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America

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