Author: Stefan Frisch and Bushra Zawaydeh
Abstract:
This paper provides evidence for the psychological reality of a highly abstract
phonotactic constraint within the verbal roots of Arabic, known as OCP-Place. In a
novel root rating task, non-roots containing constraint violations were rated less
acceptable than control non-violations. Ratings were also influenced by the
lexical neighborhood density of the non-roots within the lexicon of occurring
roots. Lexical characteristics of the non-root stimuli were controlled so that the
difference between constraint violations and controls was not in the type
frequency of consonants and consonant pairs involved, but instead a difference
between a linguistically systematic and an accidental gap in the lexicon. In other
words, the abstract constraint is a psychologically real factor in judging
non-word acceptability.