Assessing the effect of ambiguity in compositionality signaling on the processing of diphones
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Date
2018
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Elsevier
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Abstract
Consonantal diphones differ as to their ambiguity (whether or not they indicate
morphological complexity reliably by occurring exclusively either within or across morphemes)
and lexicality (how frequently they occur within morphemes rather than across
morpheme boundaries). This study empirically investigates the influence of ambiguity and
lexicality on the processing speed of consonantal diphones in speech perception. More
specifically, its goal is to test the predictions of the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis,
which asserts that phonotactic processing is influenced by morphological structure, and to
clarify the two conceptions thereof present in extant research. In two discrimination task
experiments, it is found that the processing speed of cross-morpheme diphones decreases
with their ambiguity, but there is no processing difference between primarily crossmorphemic
and morpheme-internal diphones. We conclude that the predictions of the
Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis are borne out only partially, and we discuss the
discrepancies.
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Keywords
Morphonotactics, Compositionality signaling, Ambiguity, Perception
Citation
Language Sciences 67 (2018) 14–32