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Unpublished Paper
An Online Calculator to Compute Phonotactic Probability and Neighborhood Density Based on Child Corpora of Spoken American English
Behavior Research Methods (2010)
  • Holly L. Storkel
  • Jill R. Hoover
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.

Publication Date
2010
Comments
This is the prepublished author Manuscript. Published version is located at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20479181
Citation Information
Holly L. Storkel and Jill R. Hoover. "An Online Calculator to Compute Phonotactic Probability and Neighborhood Density Based on Child Corpora of Spoken American English" Behavior Research Methods (2010)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jill_hoover/4/