Effect of Wordlikeness in Processing of Nonwords by Brazilian Portuguese Speakers

The present study addresses the issue of the emergent phonological competence abstracted from the wordforms represented in the lexicon, as stated in the Usage-based Models, considering the results of an acceptability test of nonwords. Effect of wordlikeness, the degree of similarity between a nonword and a real word, has been observed in several studies. Nonwords formed by syllables of high and low probability and of different length were especially elaborated in order to check the effect of their wordlikeness in the speaker judgment. The frequency of the syllables were obtained from an online database of texts of Brazilian Portuguese. The stimuli were judged by 22 university speakers. The results showed that judgments were based on the probabilistic properties of the stimuli. The results constitute further evidence for the relationship between phonological knowledge and statistical inference in the lexicon.