Frequency of Consonant Clusters

The psycholinguistic approach to certain linguistic phenomena is based on two general assumptions, which most structural linguists would probably accept but would probably consider irrelevant: first, that language as a form of learned behavior is subject to the general principles which govern all learned behavior; second, that to determine what these principles are and how they function, the relative frequency of phenomena may be significant. In his description of the phonology of a language, the structural linguist has usually limited his analysis to a presentation of those sequences of phonemes which occur in a language, without noting the relative frequencies of these combinations. It is true that several studies have offered systematic statements of distribution and clustering, pointing out for example that in English a phone of the /ŋ/ phoneme does not appear in word-initial position, or that /str-/ is an initial cluster but /sθr-/ is not. But the greater-than-chance occurrence of some sequences and the less-than-chance occurrence of others has usually gone unmentioned. The contribution of a psycholinguistic analysis is to suggest that these deviations from chance are not random, but are governed by some ‘lawful’ principle.