Item

Abstract

Significance

How spoken words are stored in the mind/brain is a fascinating question for our understanding of language as well as for practical applications, e.g., in clinical contexts. Since words are built as temporal sequences of speech sounds, a relevant but not yet clearly answered question is whether individual speech sounds within these sequences contribute equally to the encoding of words. Our quantitative analysis of lexicons from 12 languages demonstrates that the distribution of lexical informativeness among speech sounds within words is organized by the syllable unit, which is a computational primitive in the production and perception of words. Specifically, the beginnings of syllables, rather than the beginnings of words, hold a privileged role in representing words in the mental lexicon.

Abstract

The beginnings of words are, in some informal sense, special. This intuition is widely shared, for example, when playing word games. Less apparent is whether the intuition is substantiated empirically and what the underlying organizational principle(s) might be. Here, we answer this seemingly simple question in a quantitatively clear way. Based on arguments about the interplay between lexical storage and speech processing, we examine whether the distribution of information among different speech sounds of words is governed by a critical computational unit for online speech perception and production: syllables. By analyzing lexical databases of twelve languages, we demonstrate that there is a compelling asymmetry between syllable beginnings (onsets) versus ends (codas) in their involvement in distinguishing words stored in the lexicon. In particular, we show that the functional advantage of syllable onset reflects an asymmetrical distribution of lexical informativeness within the syllable unit but not an effect of a global decay of informativeness from the beginning to the end of a word. The converging finding across languages from a range of typological families supports the conjecture that the syllable unit, while being a critical primitive for both speech perception and production, is also a key organizational constraint for lexical storage.