Lyman's Law is active in loanwords and nonce words: Evidence from naturalness judgment studies

Lyman's Law is a general phonotactic restriction in Japanese which prohibits two voiced obstruents within the same morpheme. This law manifests itself, for example, in the blockage of Rendaku, a phenomenon which voices the initial consonant of the second member of a compound. Lyman's Law blocks Rendaku when the second member already contains a voiced obstruent. Lyman's Law has been formulated as a general phonotactic restriction against two voiced obstruents (Itô and Mester, 1986), and believed to hold only in native words, not in loanwords, because there are many loanwords that violate this restriction (e.g. [gaado] ‘guard’ and [bagu] ‘bug’: Itô and Mester, 2003 and Itô and Mester, 2008).Building on Vance (1980), Tateishi (2003) and Nishimura, 2003 and Nishimura, 2006, however, this study shows that Lyman's Law is active even in loanwords, and nonce words more generally. In Experiments I and II, native speakers of Japanese judged Rendaku in nonce words to be less natural when it resulted in a violation of Lyman's Law. In Experiment III, native speakers of Japanese judged devoicing of real loanwords and nonce words to be more natural when devoicing was caused by Lyman's Law. Therefore, the three experiments, as a package, show that Lyman's Law is active both as a blocker and a trigger of phonological alternations. A general implication of this study is that a restriction with many lexical exceptions can still impact native speakers’ treatment of loanwords and nonce words, as predicted by theories that posit that constraints are violable (Legendre et al., 1990a, Legendre et al., 1990b and Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004).

► Lyman's Law is a general phonotactic restriction in Japanese which prohibits two voiced obstruents within the same morpheme.
► Lyman's Law was believed to hold only in native words, not in loanwords, because there are many loanwords that violate this restriction.
► This study shows that Lyman's Law is active even in loanwords, and nonce words more generally.
► In Experiments I and II, native speakers of Japanese judged Rendaku of nonce words to be less natural when it resulted in a violation of Lyman's Law.
► In Experiment III, native speakers of Japanese judged devoicing to be more natural when devoicing was caused by Lyman's Law.
► Therefore, the three experiments as a package show that Lyman's Law is active both as a blocker and a trigger of phonological alternations.