*Introduction*: Language games (ludlings) involve systematic manipulation
of the phonology of words; generally the purpose of a ludling is to provide
a ‘secret language’ for a group of initiated speakers (Bagemihl 1988). As
such, ludlings must strike a balance between comprehensibility and
phonological distortion in order to provide a feasible communication system
for the initiated while preventing the uninitiated from understanding. This
property allows us to use ludlings to study how severely various
phonological transformations impede word recognition.
Reduplicative ludlings are the most common type of ludling
cross-linguistically (McCarthy 1991). They involve inserting material in a
word, some of which is copied from that word, e.g. ‘zombie’ might become [za
*za*mbi]. *We ask whether ludlings that reduplicate onsets disrupt word
recognition more than those that reduplicate nuclei*. We hypothesize that
the former will be harder to comprehend than the latter. Two things
motivate this: First, onset-reduplicating ludlings are typologically
unattested while nucleus-reduplicating ones are common (McCarthy 1991,
Nespor et al. 2003). Second, there has been much work suggesting that
consonants may be more important than vowels for word recognition (e.g. van
Ooijen 1996 et seq; see Nazzi & Cutler 2019 for review). If this is the
case, we may expect the superfluous consonants in an onset-reduplicating
game to derail lexical access more than the superfluous vowels in a
nucleus-reduplicating one. This prediction is explicitly made by Nespor et
al. 2003 but has not been tested.
*Method*: We invented 3 ludlings that inserted a C(C)V sequence after the
first nucleus of the word (see Table 1). In the *onset ludling*, the V was
fixed and the C(C) was a copy of the preceding onset; in the *nucleus
ludling*, the C was fixed and the V was a copy of the preceding nucleus.
[f] and [u] were the default onset and nucleus. A fixed *syllable ludling*
in which ‘foo’ [fu] was inserted served as a control. Materials comprised
72 English words. We adapted the ludling-learning task used by Nevins &
Endress (2007). Participants were assigned to learn one of the three test
ludlings and completed 3 phases with 24 trials each: *Familiarization*:
Participants passively listened to pairings of words and their encoded
counterparts (e.g. [zambi]… [zazumbi] for ‘zombie’ in the onset ludling).
*Recognition*: They heard a word followed by that word encoded in either
the target ludling or one of the two unfamiliar ludlings. Participants
rated the encoded form as correct or incorrect. *Comprehension*:
Participants heard a word encoded in their ludling and tried to identify
it. 96 monolingual English speakers participated.
Syllable
Nucleus
Onset
*chrome*
kro*fu*m
kro*fo*m
kro*kru*m
*zombie*
za*fu*mbi
za*fa*mbi
za*zu*mbi
*plastic*
plæ*fu*stɪk
plæ*fæ*stɪk
plæ*plu*stɪk
*Table 1*: Example words encoded in the three language games.
*Results*: Accuracy in the recognition and comprehension tests were
analyzed by fitting generalized linear mixed effects models using the lme4
package in R. Fixed factors included the type of ludling learned, number of
syllables, and word frequency. No comparisons were significant in the
recognition phase. In the comprehension phase there was a significant
effect of target Ludling at the nucleus and onset levels (see Table 1):
Participants who learned the nucleus ludling were better at decoding words
in their ludling than were participants who learned the syllable ludling.
Conversely, participants who learned the onset ludling performed worse than
those who learned the syllable one (& consequently those who learned the
nucleus one as well).
*Discussion*: This study indicates that manipulating onsets disrupts word
recognition more than manipulating nuclei, which is consistent with
psycholinguistic literature arguing that consonants are more important for
word recognition than vowels. It also indicates that the lack of an
attested, naturally-occurring onset-reduplicating ludling is due to this
functional asymmetry. Finally, it highlights two open questions: What
mechanisms drive the asymmetry between consonants and vowels, and how do we
implement it in models of word recognition?
*References*
Bagemihl, B. (1988). *Alternate phonologies and morphologies*. Doctoral
dissertation, University of British Columbia.
McCarthy, J.J. & Plénat, M. (1991). L'infixation réduplicative dans les
langages secrets. *Langages* 101:11-29.
Nazzi, T., & Cutler, A. (2019). How consonants and vowels shape
spoken-language recognition. *Annual Review of Linguistics*, *5*, 25-47.
Nespor, M., Peña, M., & Mehler, J. (2003). On the different roles of vowels
and consonants in speech processing and language acquisition. *Lingue e
linguaggio*, *2*(2), 203-230.
Nevins, A. & Endress, A. 2007. The edge of order: Analytic bias in
ludlings. Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics 12:43-53.
Van Ooijen, B. (1996). Vowel mutability and lexical selection in English:
Evidence from a word reconstruction task. *Memory & Cognition*, *24*(5),
573-583.