Phonotactics as phonology: knowledge of a complex restriction in Dutch

Abstract

The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster whose second member is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighbourhood density. The experiment also suggests that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure: it has a weaker effect on speakers' judgements when the last consonant begins a new syllable. We provide an account in terms of Hayes & Wilson's (2008) maximum entropy model of phonotactics, using constraints that go beyond the complexity permitted by their model of constraint induction.