Phoneme Repetition in the Structure of Languages

Abstract

The structure of phoneme repetition in Croatian and Hawaiian was found to be remarkably similar. In both languages, immediate repetition of phonemes as in AACHEN was very infrequent, but phoneme repetition after some degree of separation as in PROPER was significantly more frequent than chance expectation. The degree of separation for maximum probability of repetition was slightly different for vowels and consonants in both languages. This pattern of phoneme repetition was unrelated to syllable length, word length or word frequency in these languages. The hypothesis was advanced that this pattern of repetition resulted from an evolutionary process, reflected not only in recorded phonological changes in the history of languages, but also in errors in speech, and phonetic changes at rapid rates of speech, all of which frequently involve repeated phonemes.