Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Wordlikeness, which is generally equated with phonotactics, is becoming an increasingly important variable in the study of language acquisition and processing as well as in the context of verbal short term memory. Past research has sought to establish phonotactic knowledge (knowledge of the possible sequences of sounds within a language) as a distinct kind of knowledge above and beyond knowledge of individual lexical items. It is unclear, however, how separate phonotactic and lexical knowledge really are; conceivably there could be effects of similar sounding lexical neighbors on perceived wordlikeness. We report empirical evidence and analysis demonstrating independent contributions of phonotactics and of lexical neighbors in accounting for wordlikeness ratings, a finding with both methodological and cognitive implications.