frequency counts for consonant clusters in English

[Joseph Stemberger]

>> I need to find the frequency with which certain clusters appear in
>> spoken English, for example word-initial 'pl', 'str' or word-final
>> 'lp', 'fs' etc.
>>
>> Does anybody know if this data is readily available out there, or
>> would I have to perform a frequency count myself?

I'm not sure what it means to be "readily available", but here are three
references. None has precisely what you're looking for (which, if I
understand correctly, is something with full information on all parts of
the word in large corpora of spoken language).


1.  Wallace, B.J. (1950). A quantitative analysis of consonant clusters
in present-day English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.

<This has great detail for all positions in the word, including taking
morphology into account. But it's based on a sample of only 10,000
spoken words.>


2.  French, Norman R., Charles W. Carter, & Walter Koenig, Jr. (1930).
The words and sounds of telephone conversations. Bell System Technical
Journal, 9, 290-324.

<This is less detailed; tables often have an "other" category summing
many low-frequency clusters.>



3.  Stemberger, J.P. (1990). Wordshape errors in language production.
Cognition, 35, 123-157.

<Count of word-initial consonant clusters in the Brown corpus of WRITTEN
language; only token frequencies>



---Joe Stemberger
UBC