Lyman’s Law can count only up to two

Abstract

One long-standing question that is recurrently addressed in contemporary phonological studies is whether phonological systems can count beyond three. The traditional view is that phonological systems can count only up to two but not more (e.g., Ito & Mester, 2003; McCarthy & Prince, 1986); some scholars, however, recently argue that phonological system should actually be able to count beyond three (e.g., Paster, 2019; Kim, 2022). The current experiments address this general question regarding counting by studying Rendaku and Lyman’s Law in Japanese. Rendaku is a morphophonological process in which the morpheme-initial voiceless obstruent of a second member of a compound becomes voiced. The application of Rendaku is significantly reduced if the second member already contains a voiced obstruent, a generalization that is known as Lyman’s Law. Experiment 1 compared the applicability of Rendaku in nonce words which contain one voiced obstruent (e.g., [taguta]) and those which contain two voiced obstruents (e.g., [tegebi]). If Lyman’s Law counts beyond three, Rendaku application is predicted to be more substantially reduced in the latter condition, as Rendaku would create morphemes which contains three voiced obstruents (i.e., [degebi]). The results show, however, that no meaningful differences were observed between the two conditions. Experiment 2 tested the recent claim that two nasal consonants may reduce the applicability of Rendaku (Kim, 2020; Kumagai, 2017), which, if true, suggests that Lyman’s Law disfavors a configuration in which a voiced obstruent is followed by two nasals. The experimental results show that the evidence for the blockage of Rendaku by two nasals is weak at best if present at all. Overall, we conclude that there is no strong evidence that Lyman’s Law counts (Ito & Mester, 2003).

Rendaku is not blocked by two nasal consonants: A reply to Kim (2022)

“…In the current experiment, we tried to examine whether the Rendaku blockage effect by two nasal consonants can be identified in a more robust fashion. Since the difference between the two critical conditions in Kawahara & Kumagai (2022) was in the direction that was expected from Kumagai's (2017) results, there remains a possibility that that experiment was underpowered (although their data is based on responses from 143 speakers). There were a few other aspects that the current experiment attempted to expand on Kawahara & Kumagai (2022).…”

“…Since the difference between the two critical conditions in Kawahara & Kumagai (2022) was in the direction that was expected from Kumagai's (2017) results, there remains a possibility that that experiment was underpowered (although their data is based on responses from 143 speakers). There were a few other aspects that the current experiment attempted to expand on Kawahara & Kumagai (2022). First, the experiment by Kawahara & Kumagai (2022) see ( 1)).…”

“…However, there were some reasons to be careful about this new finding. Kim (2022) is based on Kim (2020), and Kawahara & Kumagai (2022) point out that reexamination of the data used by Kim (2020) shows that the blockage of Rendaku in many examples can and should be explained in terms of independently motivated restrictions on Rendaku. For instance, some examples in Kim (2020) included morphologically complex nouns (e.g.…”

“…[hVnama]; therefore, generalizability of this finding is open to question. The next experiment is Kawahara & Kumagai (2022) (their Experiment 2), which had 6 items per each condition. Their baseline condition was forms in which second and third syllables had an obstruent onset.…”

“…There were a few other aspects that the current experiment attempted to expand on Kawahara & Kumagai (2022). First, the experiment by Kawahara & Kumagai (2022) see ( 1)). Second, the experiment had 16 items per each condition to make sure that the results…”