ABSTRACT
Previous work demonstrates that a word's status as morphologically-simple or complex may be reflected in its phonetic realisation. One possible source for these effects is phonetic paradigm uniformity, in which an intended word's phonetic realisation is influenced by its morphological relatives. For example, the realisation of the inflected word frees should be influenced by the phonological plan for free, and thus be non-homophonous with the morphologically-simple word freeze. We test this prediction by analysing productions of forty such inflected/simple word pairs, embedded in pseudo-conversational speech structured to avoid metalinguistic task effects, and balanced for frequency, orthography, as well as segmental and prosodic context. We find that stem and suffix durations are significantly longer by about 4–7% in fricative-final inflected words (frees, laps) compared to their simple counterparts (freeze, lapse), while we find a null effect for stop-final words. The result suggests that wordforms influence production of their relatives.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Ingo Plag, the Spoken Morphology Research Unit at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, and the audience at the 3rd American International Morphology Meeting for helpful discussion, comments, and advice. We also thank Alexia Pimentel for assistance with recording the experimental participants. Any errors or omissions are ours.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. It is an open question whether the phonological forms of all members of a morphological paradigm are invariably assembled from constituent forms (Cohen-Goldberg, Citation2015; Cohen-Goldberg et al., Citation2013), or are activated in distinct lexical entries supported by abstracted forms (Blevins, Citation2006; Blevins, Ackerman, & Malouf, Citation2017; Hay & Baayen, Citation2005; Jackendoff & Audring, Citation2017). The proposal here assumes only that non-target phonological forms of morphological relatives can become active through spreading activations (which may or may not involve activation of constituent representations, e.g. Dell, Citation1986).
2. One question involves what elements are included in a word's phonetic-phonological form, which may specify phonological segments, stress, prosodic constituency (Levelt et al., Citation1999), a range of acceptable phonetic realizations (Goldrick et al., Citation2011; Lavoie, Citation2002; Seyfarth, Citation2014), contrastive or non-contrastive sub-segmental detail (Bybee, Citation2001; Johnson, Citation2007; Pierrehumbert, Citation2002), or other features, all of which which may not be represented together as a single integrated representation (Goldrick, Citation2014). We assume here that a phonological representation includes, at a minimum, segments and prosodic constituency as well as timing relationships (Katz, Citation2010, Citation2012).
4. In some cases in which both words were followed by a vowel or semivowel, they had different qualities. For two pairs, the target words were followed by a different segment, but excluding these from the suffix duration analysis did not qualitatively affect the results. Additionally, the target words in 33 of 40 pairs were preceded by the same segment, or else by vowels or semivowels with a different quality.
5. For the suffix durations, pilot results were the same as those reported here; stem durations and other measures were not analysed. Pilot results are reported by Seyfarth, Garellek, Malouf, and Ackerman (Citation2015, oral presentation).
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Funding
This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (Division of Graduate Education) to the first author under [grant number DGE-1144086]. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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