A small but growing body of research on English and Dutch has found that pronunciation of affixes in a word form is sensitive to paradigmatic probability – i.e., the probability of using that form over other words in the same morphological paradigm. Yet it remains unclear (a) how paradigmatic probability is best measured; (b) whether an increase in paradigmatic probability leads to phonetic enhancement or reduction; and (c) by what mechanism paradigmatic probability can affect pronunciation. The current work examines pronunciation variation of Russian verbal agreement suffixes. I show that there are two distinct patterns of variation, corresponding to two different measures of paradigmatic probability. One measure, pairwise paradigmatic probability, is associated with a pronunciation pattern that resembles phonetic enhancement. The second measure, lexeme paradigmatic probability, can show enhancement effects, but can also yield reduction effects more similar to those of contextual probability. I propose that these two patterns can be explained in an exemplar model of lexical storage. Reduction effects are the consequence of faster retrieval and encoding of an articulatory target, while effects that resemble enhancement result when the pronunciation target of both members of a pair of competing word forms is shifted towards the more frequent of two.
In their keynote article, Goldrick, Putnam and Schwarz (2016) present a computational account of code-mixing. Although they review literature on the co-activation of lexical representations and cognate facilitation effects in bilingual language processing, their model remains silent on how it interfaces with lexical factors, and how lexical factors impact code-switching. One such lexical factor is cognate status, which has been found to affect code-switching, as demonstrated in corpus analyses (e.g., Broersma & De Bot, 2006) and psycholinguistic experiments (Kootstra, Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2012). For example, using the structural priming technique to examine the role of lexical factors in code-switching, Kootstra et al. asked Dutch–English bilinguals to repeat a code-switched prime sentence (starting in Dutch and ending in English) and then describe a target picture by means of a code-switched sentence (also from Dutch into English). They observed that bilinguals' tendency to switch at the same position as in the prime sentence was increased when the prime sentence and target picture contained cognates.
Pronunciation variation in many ways is systematic, yielding patterns that a canny listener can exploit in order to aid perception. This work asks whether listeners actually do draw upon these patterns during speech perception. We focus in particular on a phenomenon known as paradigmatic enhancement, in which suffixes are phonetically enhanced in verbs which are frequent in their inflectional paradigms. In a set of four experiments, we found that listeners do not seem to attend to paradigmatic enhancement patterns. They do, however, attend to the distributional properties of a verb’s inflectional paradigm when the experimental task encourages attention to sublexical detail, as is the case with phoneme monitoring (Experiment 1a–b). When tasks require more holistic lexical processing, as with lexical decision (Experiment 2), the effect of paradigmatic probability disappears. If stimuli are presented in full sentences, such that the surrounding context provides richer contextual and semantic information (Experiment 3), even otherwise robust influences like lexical frequency disappear. We propose that these findings are consistent with a perceptual system that is flexible, and devotes processing resources to exploiting only those patterns that provide a sufficient cognitive return on investment.
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