Phonotactics constraints and the segmentation of Cantonese speech

Two word-spotting experiments were conducted to examine the question of whether native Cantonese listeners are constrained by phonotactic information in the segmentation of Cantonese continuous speech. Because there are no legal consonant clusters occurred within individual Cantonese words, so this kind of phonotactic information of words may most likely cue native Cantonese listeners the locations of possible word boundaries in the continuous speech. Finally, the observed results from the two experiments confirmed this prediction. Together with other relevant studies, we argue that phonotactic constraint is one of the useful sources of information in segmenting Cantonese continuous speech.