Durational variation in Polish fricatives provides evidence for hybrid models of phonology

Abstract

The neighborhood density of a word is the number of words that sound similar to it. Phonotactic probability is a measure of how typical (for a given language) the phoneme sequences in a word are. These two factors are known to affect speech perception in opposing directions: high neighborhood density slows down processing while high phonotactic probability speeds it up [30]. This finding supports hybrid models of phonological representation [24], as neighborhood density effects operate on lexical, and phonotactic probability effects on sublexical representations. The present paper, investigating word-initial double clusters retrieved from the Greater Poland Spoken Corpus [14], tests the predictions for durational variation in fricatives following from Vitevitch and Luce [30]. It has been found that high neighborhood density is associated with longer - while high phonotactic probability with shorter - fricative durations. Thus, further support for hybrid models of phonological storage is provided.