Inflected words in production: Evidence for a morphologically rich lexicon

Abstract

Current evidence suggests that there is a difference between the representations of multimorphemic words in production and perception. In perception, it is widely believed that both whole-word and root representations exist, while in production there is little evidence for whole-word representations. The present investigation demonstrates that whole-word and root frequency independently predict the duration of words suffixed with -ing, -ed, and -s, which reveals that both root and word representations play a role in the production of inflected English words. In a second line of analysis, we find that the number of inflected phonological neighbours independently predicts the duration of monomorphemic words, which extends these results and suggests that whole-word representations exist at the lexical level. Together these results suggest that both root and word representations of inflected words are stored in the lexicon and are relevant for the production of both monomorphemic and multimorphemic words.

ASL-LEX: A lexical database of American Sign Language

“…We found a weak negative correlation between raw sign frequency and sign duration (as determined by sign onset and offset, see above), indicating that more frequent signs are shorter ( r s = −.25; p < .001). This trend is consistent with work on spoken languages showing that word frequency is inversely related to phonetic duration, though the correlation in spoken language is generally weaker (Bell et al, 2003; Caselli, Caselli & Cohen-Goldberg, 2015; Cohen-Goldberg, 2015; Gahl et al, 2012). …”

Dimensions of similarity in the mental lexicon

“…Contrary to Caselli et al (2015), the present analyses do not distinguish between monomorphemic and morphologically complex neighbors. They also do not consider the role of neighbor orthographic similarity, which, as a reviewer points out, is an additional factor that could be at play.…”

“…As noted above, however, Caselli et al (2015) found that lexical-phonetic effects on whole-word duration were also influenced by the number of neighbors differing in the initial consonant: Caselli et al found shortening of overall word duration (as did Gahl et al, 2012, in the same corpus), whereas here, we find lengthening of initial consonant duration. An important question for future research concerns the direction of these durational effects.…”

“…This suggests that when attention is explicitly drawn to a particular neighbor, features—not segments—are the relevant dimension of similarity. Finally, Caselli, Caselli, and Goldberg (2015) found that in spontaneous speech, lexical-phonetic effects on whole word duration may be driven by the set of phonological neighbors differing from the target in the initial segment (e.g., hat, sat, for target cat ), suggesting a critical role for the location of overlap between a target and its neighbors.…”

“…Analysis 2 is motivated by recent findings underscoring the importance of the location of overlap between a target and its neighbors (Caselli et al, 2015). Here, we ask whether a position-specific definition of the phonological neighborhood is a significant predictor of VOT, and if so, how the predictive power of a segment-based, position-specific metric stacks up against both minimal pair status and total density 2 .…”