The phonotactics of English

The shapes of English words

A hurdle for learners

The phonotactics define what a spoken language allows in terms of the structuring of consonants, vowels, and syllables. Because the phonotactics varies significantly between languages and between varieties of the same language, it falls squarely within the learnability space.

Although there are general principles, English phonotactics is relatively complex.

The special properties which apply in any language or variety with respect to various phenomena just have to be learnt. For some children, this is difficult.