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Frequency of Consonant Clusters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Sol Saporta
Sol Saporta*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

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.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 31 , Issue 1-Part1: January-March , March 1955 , pp. 25 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © 1955 by the Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 For such an analysis see Benjamin L. Whorf, Linguistics as an exact science, Technology review 43:2.3-8 (1940); Zellig S. Harris, Methods in structural linguistics (Chicago, 1951).

I am indebted to Henry R. Kahane and Charles E. Osgood for valuable suggestions. I have also benefited from discussions by members of the Psycholinguistic Seminar held in the summer of 1953 at Indiana University, under the sponsorship of the Social Science Research Council.

2 The consonants /r/ and /l/, as well as vowels and semivowels, are excluded from this study. Combinations involving these phonemes need further investigation.

3 John B. Carroll, Transitional probabilities of English phonemes, Progress report on project 52 (Harvard University, Graduate School of Education; Cambridge, Mass., 1952).

4 Transcribed by Frederick B. Agard of Cornell University according to the phonemic system of Trager and Smith, An outline of English structure (Norman, Okla., 1951).

5 The phonemic transcription is taken from a dissertation by Gerald Markley, The verbal categories of substandard Mexican Spanish (University of Illinois, 1954). Spaces in Markley's transcription are interpreted as juncture phonemes.

6 Jakobson, Fant, and Halle, Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates (Cambridge, Mass., 1952); E. Alarcos Llorach, Fonologia española (Madrid, 1950).

7 Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, On the definition of phoneme categories on a distributional basis, Acta linguistica 7.8-39 (1952).

8 The Spanish curve has a minor deviation due to the occurrence of clusters with zero difference between the members. These are nearly all instances of /mm/, as in /kommígo/ ‘with me’. But this transcription is based on morphophonemic criteria; an alternative writing /komígo/ is certainly possible also.

9 Cf. George K. Zipf, Human behavior and the principle of least effort (Cambridge, Mass., 1949).