Losing Phonotactic Distinctions in Context

Abstract

Previous psycholinguistic research has demonstrated that sentence processing varies according to both syntactic and discourse context. However, a systematic investigation of how such contexts influence how the processor manages low-level representations of linguistic structure has yet to be carried out. In this paper, we conduct a series of self-paced reading experiments which show how one well-established linguistic measurement—phonotactic distinctions between non-words—varies according to the phonological, syntactic, and discourse context that the non-words appear in. Our results demonstrate that the various types of context that we control for can influence both when and if phonotactic distinctions surface. More broadly, our findings suggest that well-established phonological and psycholinguistic effects may not generalize when tested in larger contexts.