Assimilation in existing and novel German compounds

Abstract

Place assimilation is a phonologically regular variation that modifies the surface form of words: Coronal consonants can change their place of articulation (e.g., rainbow←raimbow). These variations do not seem to disturb lexical access as long as the change is licensed by the following phonemic context (Coenen, Zwitserlood, & Bölte, 2001; Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1996). This study compares the listeners’ tolerance to contextually appropriate () and inappropriate changes (bahmgleis) in existing (bahngleis; railway track) and novel German compounds (bahngeist; railway ghost). The results from two cross-modal form priming experiments reveal that listeners showed equal tolerance for contextually appropriate changes that actually occur in language and for inappropriate changes that are never produced in the context presented. This pattern held for existing and novel compounds. Our findings suggest that word form representations for possible phonemic variants of morphologically complex words are not listed in the lexicon.

We thank Nadine Pfeiffer, who ran Experiment 2 in partial fulfillment of her Masters thesis (Pfeiffer, 2003). We gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments by Gareth Gaskell, Aditi Lahiri, and an anonymous reviewer on an earlier version of this paper. We thank Helene Kreysa and Heidrun Bien for their help in conducting and presenting this research.

Notes

¹Note that the power is reduced by the loss of items.

²Our research was conducted before the FUL model was fully specified.