An Online Calculator to Compute Phonotactic Probability and Neighborhood Density on the Basis of Child Corpora of Spoken American English

Overview

Journal Behav Res Methods

Publisher Springer

Specialty Social Sciences

Date 2010 May 19

PMID 20479181

Citations 91

Authors

Holly L Storkel

Jill R Hoover

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

An online calculator was developed (www.bncdnet.ku.edu/cml/info_ccc.vi) to compute phonotactic probability--the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence--and neighborhood density--the number of phonologically similar words--on the basis of child corpora of American English (Kolson, 1960; Moe, Hopkins, & Rush, 1982) and to compare its results to those of an adult calculator. Phonotactic probability and neighborhood density were computed for a set of 380 nouns (Fenson et al., 1993) using both the child and adult corpora. The child and adult raw values were significantly correlated. However, significant differences were detected. Specifically, child phonotactic probability was higher than adult phonotactic probability, especially for high-probability words, and child neighborhood density was lower than adult neighborhood density, especially for words with high-density neighborhoods. These differences were reduced or eliminated when relative measures (i.e., z scores) were used. Suggestions are offered regarding which values to use in future research.

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