What people know about sounds of language

Abstract: Generative phonology has the goal of developing a comprehensive and predictive model of implicit knowledge of sound structure. In this paper, I review the nature and import of the discoveries about implicit knowledge which were made possible by modern methods for gathering experimental data and for analyzing large data sets. First, it is known that languages dier in extremely ne phonetic detail. These systematic dierences are learned by speakers and repre-sent part of their implicit knowledge. Second, knowledge of phonological grammar gradiently re ects the frequencies of patterns in the lexicon. Third, knowledge of morphophonological alternations re ects the frequencies of word relations in the lexicon. These ndings point to a model of phonology in which gradient phonetic resources are organized and exploited by languages in their lexical inventories, and the phonological grammar arises as generalizations over the lexicon. 1