Knowledge of perceptual similarity and its phonological uses: evidence from half-rhymes

ABSTRACT A study of half-rhymes (HR's) in Romanian poetry reveals that poets systematically prefer HR's corresponding to certain common phonological processes: final devoicing, post-nasal voicing, nasalplace neutralization, stressless vowel reduction, coda cluster simplification, nasalized vowel centralization, liquid metathesis. The striking observation is that none of these processes operates in Romanian phonology at a categorical level. But at least some have an identifiable phonetic basis: thusˆ) and u) which are involved in a large number of HR's, are closer on the F2 dimension than oralˆand u. It is suggested that poets' prefer these HR's based on their knowledge of perceptually-based relative similarity relations, not on their knowledge of sound alternations or distributions