or : Eye movements during the processing of translingual hybrid noun-formations.

This eye tracking experiment tests how the brain recognizes and processes hybrid German-English word-formations and how this process compares to monolingual items. Thirty bilingual German-English adults from the Oxford area (23 females; mean age = 28.0, SD = 9.

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.

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.

"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.