Effects of Word Frequency on the Production of English ‘Alveolar Nasal and Stop’ Sequences

This study investigates a context-dependent allophonic rule in English whereby alveolar consonants delete as a function of word frequency. A particular question to be addressed in this study is whether or not word frequency affects the deletion of stop consonants that immediately follow a coronal nasal (/n/). The working hypothesis is that word frequency will affect deletion of the stop consonants in such a way that deletion will be more common in high-frequency words than in low-frequency words. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that more extreme or careful articulation may be involved in less frequent words, resulting in the retention of the underlying consonant sequence on the surface, while less careful articulation may be involved in highly frequent words, resulting in the surface omission of some underlying segments. The results indicate that there seems to be a tendency that /d/ is dropped more frequently in high-frequency words than in low-frequency words. However, the expectation that the pattern of deletion of [t] will be similar to the pattern shown by [d]-deletion was not borne out. The implications of the results are discussed with regard to the issue of the levels of phonological representations of word forms.