نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسنده
دانشیار گروه آموزشی زبان انگلیسی دانشگاه فردوسی مشهد، مشهد، ایران.
کلیدواژهها
عنوان مقاله English
نویسنده English
Lexical frequency is considered an important factor in usage-based phonology, yet its influence on the distribution of word-initial phonemes in Persian has received limited empirical attention. This study investigates the distributional pattern of word-initial phonological classes in Persian and evaluates the extent to which lexical frequency affects this pattern. The dataset consisted of the first 1,000 entries in Routledge Frequency Dictionary of Persian, divided into two frequency groups comprising the 500 most frequent words and the following 500 words. The initial segment of each word was classified into seven phonological categories: stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, liquids, glides, and vowels. The distributions of these categories were compared using the Chi-square test of independence, and effect size was assessed with Cramer's V. The findings reveal a remarkably stable phonological organization across both frequency groups. Stops constitute the dominant word-initial class, followed by fricatives, while the overall proportion of obstruents and sonorants remains highly consistent. The distribution of individual phonemes is also strongly skewed, with only a small number of phonemes—particularly /m/, /e/, /s/, /t/, /d/, /b/, and /h/—accounting for a substantial proportion of all word onsets, whereas many others occur only rarely in initial position. These results highlight the central role of Persian phonotactic constraints and syllable structure in shaping the organization of word-initial phonemes. Although minor differences in the frequencies of some phonological classes were observed between the two lexical-frequency groups, these differences were not statistically significant, and the associated effect size was negligible. The findings therefore suggest that lexical frequency plays only a limited role in determining the distribution of word-initial phonological classes within the high-frequency Persian lexicon, whereas structural phonological constraints provide a more robust explanation. The study contributes empirical evidence to Persian phonology and offers implications for corpus linguistics, computational language processing, speech technology, and Persian language education.
کلیدواژهها English
