Ithaca College

Skott Jones, Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, in collaboration with two former graduate students, Amanda DiTomaso and Meredith Gennaro, published a study on phonological similarity in the current issue of Applied Psycholinguistics. 

In the study, 50 typical adults were presented with 70 nonwords, and asked to name a similar-sounding real word for each item. Results indicated that participants changed an average of one sound per word, although a fifth of productions involved changing more than one of the sounds; substitutions were the most common change. Stimuli that received a wide variety of responses, and that did not phonologically resemble many real words, resulted in the greatest number of sound changes. Using a single-sound metric to index phonological similarity has its limitations, and may inadequately incorporate other influential elements of a word such as the frequencies of its neighbors.