Hip-hop rhymes reiterate phonological typology

•We describe the construction and analysis of a database of hip-hop rhymes.•Likelihood of imperfect rhymes displays asymmetries by feature and context.•These asymmetries match typological patterns of contrast neutralization.•We argue that both phonology and rhyme reflect speakers’ phonetic knowledge.

In this paper, we analyze a database of rhymes from African-American English hip-hop. The analysis shows that rappers possess detailed implicit knowledge about speech sounds that is largely irrelevant to the sound pattern of their particular language, but has been argued to play a role in constraining possible sound systems across all human languages. We argue that rhyme data are related to phonological typology because many phonological patterns involve the neutralization of contrasts in contexts where they are less perceptible, and rhyme involves implicit judgments of perceptual similarity between sounds. The general finding is that sounds are more likely to mismatch in a rhyme in those contexts where the contrast between the sounds is more likely to neutralize cross-linguistically, even though the contrasts studied here do not neutralize in these contexts in English. The results contribute to the evidence for detailed implicit phonetic knowledge and bear on the issue of synchronic explanation in linguistic theory.