Coronal underspecification as an emerging property in the development of speech processing.

Is the developing lexicon phonologically detailed or are representations underspecified? Experimental results from toddlers suggest phonological specificity. By contrast, the featurally underspecified lexicon theory (Lahiri, 2018; Lahiri & Reetz, 2010), motivated by evidence such as the cross-linguistic prevalence of phenomena such as coronal assimilation (rainbow → rai[m]bow), proposes that coronal sounds are unspecified for place of articulation even in the adult lexicon. The featurally underspecified lexicon, therefore, predicts that asymmetries in mispronunciation sensitivity are also present in the developing lexicon.

Shared Loanword Recognition in German-English Bilinguals: The Role of Metrical Phonology.

The role of phonology in bilingual word recognition has focused on a phonemic level especially in the recognition of cognates. In this study, we examined differences in metrical structure to test whether first language (L1) metrical structure influences the processing of second language (L2) words. For that, we used words of Romance origin (e.

Disambiguating Effects of Syllable Position and Neighborhood Size: Contributions of Hanja During Sino-Korean Processing.

A language's writing system offers a complex lens through which to explore its lexicon. Korean's bi-scriptal lexicon comprising its native script Hangul and Chinese Hanja, enables a unique window into what is and is not permissible in the language, as well as a chance to investigate how properties of the written form are reflected in the mental representation of the language. Through a novel priming paradigm, we investigated the effects of Hanja on visual word recognition in Hangul.

Bengali nasal vowels: lexical representation and listener perception.

This paper focuses on the question of the representation of nasality as well as speakers' awareness and perceptual use of phonetic nasalisation by examining surface nasalisation in two types of vowels in Bengali: underlying nasal vowels (CṼC) and nasalised vowels before a nasal consonant (CVN). A series of three cross-modal forced-choice experiments was used to investigate the hypothesis that only unpredictable nasalisation is stored and that this sparse representation governs how listeners interpret vowel nasality. Visual full-word targets were preceded by auditory primes consisting of CV segments of CVC words with nasal vowels ([tʃɑ̃] for [tʃɑ̃d] 'moon'), oral vowels ([tʃɑ] for [tʃɑl] 'unboiled rice') or nasalised oral vowels ([tʃɑ̃(n)] for [tʃɑ̃n] 'bath') and reaction times and errors were measured.

Distinct orthography boosts morphophonological discrimination: Vowel raising in Bengali verb inflections.

This study is concerned with how vowel alternation, in combination with and without orthographic reflection of the vowel change, affects lexical access and the discrimination of morphologically related forms. Bengali inflected verb forms provide an ideal test case, since present tense verb forms undergo phonologically conditioned, predictable vowel raising. The mid-to-high alternations, but not the low-to-mid ones, are represented in the orthography.

Mismatch negativity (MMN) as an index of asymmetric processing of consonant duration in fake Mandarin geminates.

Unlike languages where consonant duration is used contrastively to distinguish word meanings, long consonants in Mandarin Chinese only occur across morpheme boundaries as a result of concatenation and are referred to as fake geminates. To investigate whether Mandarin speakers employ duration contrast to differentiate fake Mandarin geminates and corresponding singletons as well as the underlying pattern of the processing, two auditory oddball tasks were carried out to measure the component of MMN, an index of the automatic detection of deviant stimulus. Mandarin pseudoword pairs which differ only in the duration of the medial consonant ([an1 an1] ∼ [an1 nan1] vs.

Features of low functional load in mono- and bilinguals' lexical access: evidence from Swedish tonal accent.

Swedish makes use of tonal accents (Accents 1 and 2) to contrast words, but the functional load is very low, with some regional dialects not even exhibiting the contrast. In particular given the low number of minimal pairs, the question is whether tonal word accent is used in lexical access. Here we present two cross-modal fragment semantic priming studies in order to address this question.

Asymmetric Influence of Vocalic Context on Mandarin Sibilants: Evidence From ERP Studies.

In the present study, we examine the interactive effect of vowels on Mandarin fricative sibilants using a passive oddball paradigm to determine whether the HEIGHT features of vowels can spread on the surface and influence preceding consonants with unspecified features. The stimuli are two pairs of Mandarin words ([sa] ∼ [ʂa] and [su] ∼ [ʂu]) contrasting in vowel HEIGHT ([LOW] vs. [HIGH]).

(A)Symmetry in vowel features in verbs and pseudoverbs: ERP evidence.

This paper examines the processing of height and place contrasts in vowels in words and pseudowords, using mismatch negativity (MMN) to determine firstly whether asymmetries resulting from underlying representations found in the processing of vowels in isolation will remain in a word context and secondly whether there is any difference in the way these phonological differences manifest in pseudowords. The stimuli are two sets of English ablaut verbs and corresponding pseudowords (sit ~ sat/*sif~*saf and get ~ got/*gef~*gof) contrasting in vowel height ([high] vs. [low]) and place of articulation ([coronal] vs.

Gradations of interpretability in spoken complex word recognition.

In an ERP experiment with cross-modal priming, we found evidence for graded interpretability of complex pseudowords, expressed as differences in the degree of priming between a complex pseudoword and its embedded base word. Only pseudowords that were constructed according to the morphological constraints of the language (for instance that nouns ending in {-ung} in German must be derived from a verbal base) led to significant attenuation of the N400 component relative to an unrelated control. Novel formations that consisted of the concatenation of a stem and an incompatible affix (e.

Beyond decomposition: Processing zero-derivations in English visual word recognition.

Four experiments investigate the effects of covert morphological complexity during visual word recognition. Zero-derivations occur in English in which a change of word class occurs without any change in surface form (e.g.

Lexical gaps and morphological decomposition: Evidence from German.

On the evidence of four lexical-decision tasks in German, we examine speakers' sensitivity to internal morphological composition and abstract morphological rules during the processing of derived words, real and novel. In a lexical-decision task with delayed priming, speakers were presented with two-step derived nouns such as Heilung "healing" derived from the adjective heil "intact" via the verb heilen "to heal." These were compared with two sets of derived novel words, one with and the other without an intermediate verb; for example, *Spitzung "sharpening" from spitz "sharp" via spitzen "sharpen" (Experiment 1) and *Hübschung "beautifying" from hübsch "pretty" via *hübschen "beautify" (Experiment 2).

The neural correlates of morphological complexity processing: Detecting structure in pseudowords.

Morphological complexity is a highly debated issue in visual word recognition. Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that speakers are sensitive to degrees of morphological complexity. Two-step derived complex words (bridging through bridge  > bridge  > bridging) led to more enhanced activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus than their 1-step derived counterparts (running through run  > running).

Phonological feature-based speech recognition system for pronunciation training in non-native language learning.

The authors address the question whether phonological features can be used effectively in an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for pronunciation training in non-native language (L2) learning. Computer-aided pronunciation training consists of two essential tasks-detecting mispronunciations and providing corrective feedback, usually either on the basis of full words or phonemes. Phonemes, however, can be further disassembled into phonological features, which in turn define groups of phonemes.

"Fake" gemination in suffixed words and compounds in English and German.

In languages with an underlying consonantal length contrast, the most salient acoustic cue differentiating singletons and geminates is duration of closure. When concatenation of identical phonemes through affixation or compounding produces "fake" geminates, these may or may not be realized phonetically as true geminates. English and German no longer have a productive length contrast in consonants, but do allow sequences of identical consonants in certain morphological contexts, e.

Processing of Phonemic Consonant Length: Semantic and Fragment Priming Evidence from Bengali.

Six cross-modal lexical decision tasks with priming probed listeners' processing of the geminate-singleton contrast in Bengali, where duration alone leads to phonemic contrast ([pata] 'leaf' vs. [pat:a] 'whereabouts'), in order to investigate the phonological representation of consonantal duration in the lexicon. Four form-priming experiments (auditory fragment primes and visual targets) were designed to investigate listeners' sensitivity to segments of conflicting duration.

Asymmetric processing of durational differences - electrophysiological investigations in Bengali.

Duration is used contrastively in many languages to distinguish word meaning (e.g. in Bengali, [pata] 'leaf' vs.

Processing of zero-derived words in English: an fMRI investigation.

Derivational morphological processes allow us to create new words (e.g. punish (V) to noun (N) punishment) from base forms.

Activation of words with phonological overlap.

Multiple lexical representations overlapping with the input (cohort neighbors) are temporarily activated in the listener's mental lexicon when speech unfolds in time. Activation for cohort neighbors appears to rapidly decline as soon as there is mismatch with the input. However, it is a matter of debate whether or not they are completely excluded from further processing.

Inequality across consonantal contrasts in speech perception: evidence from mismatch negativity.

The precise structure of speech sound representations is still a matter of debate. In the present neurobiological study, we compared predictions about differential sensitivity to speech contrasts between models that assume full specification of all phonological information in the mental lexicon with those assuming sparse representations (only contrastive or otherwise not predictable information is stored). In a passive oddball paradigm, we studied the contrast sensitivity as reflected in the mismatch negativity (MMN) response to changes in the manner of articulation, as well as place of articulation of consonants in intervocalic positions of nonwords (manner of articulation: [edi ~ eni], [ezi ~ eni]; place of articulation: [edi ~ egi]).

"What you encode is not necessarily what you store": evidence for sparse feature representations from mismatch negativity.

The present study examines whether vowels embedded in complex stimuli may possess underspecified representations in the mental lexicon. The second goal was to assess the possible interference of the lexical status of stimuli under study. Minimal pairs of German nouns differing only in the stressed vowels [e], [ø], and [o], and derived pseudowords, were used to measure the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) in a passive oddball-paradigm.

Height differences in English dialects: consequences for processing and representation.

This study examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.

Asymmetric processing of lexical tonal contrast in Swedish.

Languages such as Swedish use suprasegmental information such as tone, over and above segments, to mark lexical contrast. Theories differ with respect to the abstractness and specification of tone in the mental lexicon. In a forced choice task, we tested Swedish listeners' responses to words with segmentally identical first syllables differing in tonal contours (characterized as Accents 1 and 2).

Opaque for the reader but transparent for the brain: neural signatures of morphological complexity.

Within linguistics, words with a complex internal structure are commonly assumed to be decomposed into their constituent morphemes (e.g., un-help-ful).