Using phonotactics information in spoken word recognition processes: Evidence from Chinese

The present study attests the research question of whether native Chinese listeners are constrained by phonotactics information in the spoken word recognition processes using the word-spotting experiment. In the linguistic structure of Chinese, there are no legal consonant clusters occurred within each individual Chinese word, and this kind of phonotactics information of words may most likely cue native Chinese listeners the possible locations of word boundaries in the continuous Chinese speech. The results observed from the word-spotting experiment supported this prediction. Along with other relevant studies, we argue that phonotactics is one of the useful sources of information in the cognitive processes of spoken word recognition in Chinese.