The mental storage of lexical representations faces a major challenge, which is to reliably transfer these representations among different speakers via the noisy channel of speech communication (Shannon, 1948). It has been largely demonstrated that computational properties of language use could influence phonological forms of stored lexical items, in order to achieve greater efficiency in communication (Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2011).

The current study examines whether such coherence exists between the robustness with which different phoneme positions within words are processed during speech operations (i.e., perception and production) and the functional relevance of these positions in storing crucial information for contrasting words from each other. Importantly, we conduct the analysis in multiple linguistic systems in order to investigate to what extent this potential storage feature can be generalized across different languages and how it is linked to fundamental phonological regularities of these languages

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