The Meredith Family-Sweep Protocol--A Systematic Test of Vowel-Run Length as a Conditioner of Prefix Pathway in Voynichese

Core Focus: This paper formalizes and introduces the Meredith Family-Sweep Protocol—an automated, threshold-driven census of every eligible vowel-run family across 37,044 word tokens to test whether vowel-run length conditions prefix choice in Voynichese. Key Findings: The protocol demonstrates that the dose-response decline in direct-pathway prefixes replicates across nine of ten eligible e-families (six at $p < 0.0001$), but fails to appear in i-families or an exceptional e-family (e+ky), indicating that the conditioning variable is tied to vowel identity and root-level exceptions. Methodological Significance: By replacing hand-selection with fixed sample-size thresholds and mandatory reporting of all null results, the protocol provides a reproducible, selection-bias-resistant standard for testing structural conditioning relations in the Voynich manuscript.