Competition between whole-word and decomposed representations of English prefixed words

Abstract

English aspiration is influenced by word structure: in general, a voiceless stop following s is unaspirated (des[t]royed), but it can be aspirated if a prefix-stem boundary intervenes (dis[tʰ]rusts) (Baker, Smith & Hawkins 2007). In a production study of 110 words prefixed with dis-or mis-, we show that even in prefixed words, there is variation (dis[k]laimers ~ dis[kʰ]laimers), and that aspiration in such words is correlated with word and stem frequency. The more frequent the word, the less likely aspiration, but the more frequent the stem, the more likely aspiration. This contrasting frequency effect is characteristic of the type of competition Hay posits between whole-word lexical access and morphologically decomposed lexical access (Hay 2003): frequent words will tend to be accessed as wholes (and therefore behave as though there is no prefix-stem boundary), but frequent stems will encourage decomposed, prefix + stem access. In order to test whether there is active online competition, as opposed to simply frequency effects that are somehow lexicalized, we also conduct a priming experiment. We find that exposing participants to other prefixed words encourages them to aspirate target words, as compared to when they have been exposed to similar but non-prefixed words.These results provide evidence for active online competition.

Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Speech Production: Modeling the Acoustic Duration of English Derived Words With Linear Discriminative Learning

“…It is a frequency-based measure for morphological decomposability. Morphological decomposability, or segmentability, has been found to affect duration in a number of studies (Hay, 2003 , 2007 ; Pluymaekers et al, 2005b ; Schuppler et al, 2012 ; Zimmerer et al, 2014 ; Ben Hedia and Plag, 2017 ; Plag and Ben Hedia, 2018 ; Zuraw et al, 2020 ). The higher the relative frequency, the more decomposable the item is assumed to be.…”

“…For derivation, too, studies have demonstrated effects of morphological structure on phonetic output. For example, morphological geminates in English differ in duration depending on morphological category and informativity (Ben Hedia and Plag, 2017 ; Ben Hedia, 2019 ), and phonetic reduction in various domains can depend on how easily speakers can decompose a complex word into its constituents (e.g., Hay, 2003 , 2007 ; Plag and Ben Hedia, 2018 ; Zuraw et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Yet, morphological effects on the phonetic output have repeatedly been observed, which is incompatible with these assumptions. For example, the observation that complex words are more acoustically reduced when they are less decomposable into their constituents (Hay, 2003 , 2007 ; Plag and Ben Hedia, 2018 ; Zuraw et al, 2020 ) seems to suggest that information about morphological boundaries must somehow still be present at the phonetic level. From the perspective of the speech production models and theories of the morphology-phonology interaction outlined above, such effects are unexpected, and the mechanisms behind them are unclear.…”

Early metrical and lexicographical evidence for functional stress-shifts

“…The ranking of these factors is a matter we cannot address yet, nor do we have the numbers or methodologies that might clear up the picture (Elkins 2020; Zuraw et al 2021). Our findings nevertheless support a hypothesis that treats prefixes as the fifth column undermining the GSR from the earliest records on.…”

Long-lag identity priming in the absence of long-lag morphological priming: evidence from Mandarin tone alternation

“…These two classes of models are not mutually exclusive (Wheeldon & Monsell, 1992;, and modern accounts often assume that the lexicon needs to include a combination of abstract representations and information about frequency of variants and morphological components (e.g. Hay & Baayen, 2005;Connine & Pinnow, 2006;Sciama & Dowker, 2007;Pierrehumbert, 2016;Zuraw et al, 2021). Even if normal lexical access does involve episodic representations, some sort of abstraction presumably needs to also be available, because compensation for phonological alternation occurs even in pseudowords -for example, in French, where obstruents can assimilate in voicing to a following obstruent, listeners not only interpret e.g.…”