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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1518754
Cross-language variation in the acceptability of vowelless nonwords
Provisionally accepted- 1 University of California, Davis, Davis, United States
- 2 Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France
- 3 Mohammed V University at Souissi, Rabat, Morocco
This study examines the acceptability of voweled and vowelless nonwords produced by a native speaker of Tashlhiyt (a Moroccan Amazigh language) across listeners from five different language groups: L1 Tashlhiyt, L1 Tarifit, L1 Moroccan Arabic, L1 English, and L1 Mandarin. The languages vary in the complexity of allowable word types, though only Tashlhiyt allows lexically vowelless word forms. Hyper-and hypo-speech forms of the items were also compared in order to explore the effect of speaking style on listeners' phonological knowledge. Results show gradient cross-language effects of nonword acceptability: compared to the native Tashlhiyt listeners, L1 Tarifit and L1 Moroccan Arabic listeners did not differ in their wordlike judgments. In contrast, L1 English showed lower and sonority-based wordlikeness preferences; L1 Mandarin listeners provided the lowest ratings of Tashlhiyt nonwords and were not sensitive to sonority variations. In contrast to the language-specific effect of word phonotactics, the role of clear speech in enhancing wordlikeness judgments was equivalent in effect size across language backgrounds.
Keywords: Wordlikeness, Speech Perception, phonological theory, clear speech, Amazigh languages
Received: 28 Oct 2024; Accepted: 04 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zellou, Afkir, Lahrouchi and Bensoukas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Georgia Zellou, University of California, Davis, Davis, United States
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