Information Bias Inside English Words*

Abstract Previous works in cognitive science have reported that human cognition of words includes two preferences: a locational preference, by which word prefixes are remembered better than suffixes, and suffixes better than infixes; and a consonantal preference, by which consonants are remembered better than vowels. In this paper, the ambiguity with respect to prefix/infix/suffix and consonant/vowel is compared in terms of conditional entropy, by using large-scale data from English. The results show that consonants indeed have less ambiguity than vowels, and also, that the locational preference holds if word middles are considered as wholes.

[1]  Helge Lødrup Raising to object in Norwegian and the derived object constraint , 2008 .

[2]  Ingo Plag,et al.  Words in the mind , 2012 .

[3]  S. Lupker,et al.  Can CANISO activate CASINO? Transposed-letter similarity effects with nonadjacent letter positions ☆ , 2004 .

[4]  Claude E. Shannon,et al.  A mathematical theory of communication , 1948, MOCO.

[5]  C. Whitney How the brain encodes the order of letters in a printed word: The SERIOL model and selective literature review , 2001, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[6]  W. H. Bowen,et al.  Oeuvres complètes. I , 1957 .

[7]  Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii,et al.  From phoneme to morpheme — another verification in English and Chinese using corpora — , 2008 .

[8]  Josep Roca i Pons André Martinet: Élements de linguistique générale. París, "Collection Armand Colin", 1961. 224 pàgines. 6ª reimpressió, 1971. - Versió castellana revisada: Madrid, Gredos, 1972. (BRH, III/13) , 1980 .

[9]  Sang Joon Kim,et al.  A Mathematical Theory of Communication , 2006 .

[10]  James L. McClelland,et al.  An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: I. An account of basic findings. , 1981 .

[11]  Niloy Ganguly,et al.  Redundancy Ratio: An Invariant Property of the Consonant Inventories of the World's Languages , 2007, ACL.

[12]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[13]  J. Aitchison Words in the mind , 1994 .

[14]  Marcela Peña,et al.  ON THE DIFFERENT ROLES OF VOWELS AND CONSONANTS IN SPEECH PROCESSING AND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION , 2003 .

[15]  Boris New,et al.  Beyond stop consonants: Consonantal specificity in early lexical acquisition , 2007 .

[16]  David Gil,et al.  The World Atlas of Language Structures , 2005 .

[17]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Kanzi: The ape at the brink of the human mind , 1996, International Journal of Primatology.

[18]  N. Sebastián-Gallés,et al.  Constraints of vowels and consonants on lexical selection: Cross-linguistic comparisons , 2000, Memory & cognition.

[19]  R. Lewin,et al.  Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind , 1994 .

[20]  Roger S. Brown,et al.  The "Tip of the Tongue" Phenomenon , 1966 .

[21]  J. Dubois Dictionnaire de linguistique et des sciences du langage , 1999 .

[22]  William D. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Lexical Representation and Process , 1991 .

[23]  A. Martinet Éléments de linguistique générale , 1964 .

[24]  James L. McClelland,et al.  An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: part 1.: an account of basic findings , 1988 .

[25]  G. M. Reicher Perceptual recognition as a function of meaninfulness of stimulus material. , 1969, Journal of experimental psychology.

[26]  D. D. Wheeler Processes in word recognition , 1970 .

[27]  Z. Harris From Phoneme to Morpheme , 1955 .

[28]  M Coltheart,et al.  DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. , 2001, Psychological review.

[29]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Lexical Representation and Process , 1989 .

[30]  Sophie K. Scott,et al.  Lexical retrieval constrained by sound structure: The role of the left inferior frontal gyrus , 2005, Brain and Language.

[31]  Brenda Rapp,et al.  Consonants and vowels in orthographic representations , 2006, Cognitive neuropsychology.