Lexical representation and processing of word-initial morphological alternations: Scottish Gaelic mutation
Author
Ussishkin, AdamWarner, Natasha
Clayton, Ian
Brenner, Daniel
Carnie, Andrew
Hammond, Michael
Fisher, Muriel
Affiliation
Univ Arizona, Dept LinguistIssue Date
2017-04-12
Metadata
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UBIQUITY PRESS LTDCitation
Lexical representation and processing of word-initial morphological alternations: Scottish Gaelic mutation 2017, 8 (1):8 Laboratory PhonologyJournal
Laboratory PhonologyRights
© 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0).Collection Information
This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
When hearing speech, listeners begin recognizing words before reaching the end of the word. Therefore, early sounds impact spoken word recognition before sounds later in the word. In languages like English, most morphophonological alternations affect the ends of words, but in some languages, morphophonology can alter the early sounds of a word. Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has a pattern of 'initial consonant mutation' that changes initial consonants: Pog 'kiss' begins with [ph], but phog 'kissed' begins with [f]. This raises questions both of how listeners process words that might begin with a mutated consonant during spoken word recognition, and how listeners relate the mutated and unmutated forms to each other in the lexicon. We present three experiments to investigate these questions. A priming experiment shows that native speakers link the mutated and unmutated forms in the lexicon. A gating experiment shows that Gaelic listeners usually do not consider mutated forms as candidates during lexical recognition until there is enough evidence to force that interpretation. However, a phonetic identification experiment confirms that listeners can identify the mutated sounds correctly. Together, these experiments contribute to our understanding of how speakers represent and process a language with morphophonological alternations at word onset.Note
Open Access JournalISSN
1868-63541868-6354
Version
Final published versionSponsors
National Science Foundation [BCS11443818]Additional Links
http://www.journal-labphon.org/article/10.5334/labphon.22/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.5334/labphon.22
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0).