Phonological And Phonetic Considerations Of Lexical Processing

The human ability to understand and produce spoken words is fascinating in its complexity. People often vary in how they pronounce a word. They may need to recognize words spoken with an accent quite different from their own. And, in order to understand a word of a second or foreign language, they may need to identify words on the basis of sounds that are difficult to differentiate. This book brings together psycholinguistic research that addresses these topics and highlights how the study of spoken word processing can shed light on fundamental dynamics of language processing. It demonstrates how spoken word processing is affected by the specific characteristics of individual languages and their writing systems and how it grows and changes across the lifespan. The book offers new cutting-edge research on spoken word processing. It will benefit researchers and students interested in language processing as well as readers who wish to broaden their understanding of language in the mind. In particular, this book underlines the value of conducting psycholinguistic research across languages and across the lifespan. Originally published in The Mental Lexicon Vol. 8:3 (2013).

This volume demonstrates that phonology is a subsystem of the mind/brain and explores the theoretical and practical (including medical) consequences of this insight. Written by American and European specialists at the cutting-edge of research in areas ranging from phonetics to neurology, the book addresses central questions relating to the cognitive status of phonological representation and phonetic implementation and the links between mental and physical representation of sound systems.

A research perspective that takes language use into account opens up new views of old issues and provides an understanding of issues that linguists have rarely addressed. Referencing new developments in cognitive and functional linguistics, phonetics, and connectionist modeling, this book investigates various ways in which a speaker/hearer's experience with language affects the representation of phonology. Rather than assuming phonological representations in terms of phonemes, Joan Bybee adopts an exemplar model, in which specific tokens of use are stored and categorized phonetically with reference to variables in the context. This model allows an account of phonetically gradual sound change which produces lexical variation, and provides an explanatory account of the fact that many reductive sound changes affect high frequency items first. The well-known effects of type and token frequency on morphologically-conditioned phonological alterations are shown also to apply to larger sequences, such as fixed phrases and constructions, solving some of the problems formulated previously as dealing with the phonology-syntax interface.

Studies in Lexical Phonology

This book presents a description of the phonology and morphology of the nominal class system in Fula, a dialect which displays 21 nominal classes. These are identified by suffixes, which can attach to nominal, verbal and adjectival stems. The main objective of this work is to show, through a lexical analysis, that there are only two monomorphemic marker variants, and that the distribution of these variants is predictable.

This volume of the series integrates core areas of laboratory phonology with psycholinguistic themes.

This volume contains revised, expanded and updated versions of papers originally presented at the International Workshop on Phonological Structure held at the University of Durham in September 1994. As the title suggests, the contributions focus on aspects of phonological structure, both segment internal and suprasegmental. A number of questions surrounding phonological structure are approached from a wide variety of theoretical standpoints, including the frameworks of prosodic phonology, declarative phonology, optimality theory, metrical phonology, government phonology, feature geometry, particle theory and dependency phonology. This range of viewpoints allows the crossfertilisation of various strands of phonological thinking with respect to many of the central issues concerning phonological structure. The empirical basis of the contributions is also wide-ranging, including among the languages dealt with Aranda, Cayuvava, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish.