Symmetry or asymmetry: Evidence for underspecification in the mental lexicon

Abstract

We focus here on asymmetries which are part and parcel of phonological systems of natural language. We provide an overview of our assumptions concerning asymmetric representations, which are abstract and underspecificied, outlining the principles underpinning the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL;Lahiri & Reetz, 2002, 2010 and illustrating how questions regarding the specificity of lexical representations can be translated into experimental paradigms addressing processing issues. The second half of the chapter is dedicated to the discussion of experimental studies, covering segmental feature contrasts (place and manner) in consonants and vowels as well as duration contrasts in consonants. Experimental results from English and Bengali support our hypotheses that underspecified asymmetric representations lead to asymmetries in processing.

Mismatch negativity (MMN) as an index of asymmetric processing of consonant duration in fake Mandarin geminates

“… Roberts et al, 2014 ; Kotzor et al, 2017a ) also confirmed this asymmetric processing pattern. Roberts et al (2014) used a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm with EEG which showed activation patterns in line with the behavioural experiments in Kotzor et al (2017a , 2017b) , with similar N400 attenuation for real words and singletons which were mispronounced as geminates but no N400 reduction for original geminates where the medial vowel was shortened to a singleton. The same asymmetric pattern was also found in pre-attentive processing in a standard oddball paradigm indicated by a difference in the mismatch negativity (MMN) component ( Kotzor et al, 2017a ).…”

“…Recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies (cf. Roberts et al, 2014 ; Kotzor et al, 2016a , 2016b & 2017a , 2017b ) have argued for a privative representation of duration where a monovalent feature is either present in a segment or absent. This proposal is based on experimental evidence from languages with underlying duration contrasts (e.g.…”

“…In order to distinguish between these different proposals, experimental studies have been conducted using both behavioural and neurobiological methods (e.g. Roberts et al, 2014 , Kotzor et al, 2016b , 2017a , 2017b ).…”

“…The same asymmetric pattern was also found in pre-attentive processing in a standard oddball paradigm indicated by a difference in the mismatch negativity (MMN) component ( Kotzor et al, 2017a ). As the MMN represents pre-attentive processing, the asymmetry is thus evident in both early and late stages of accessing the lexical representations from the mental lexicon ( Kotzor et al, 2017a , 2017b ).…”

(A)Symmetry in vowel features in verbs and pseudoverbs: ERP evidence

“…Näätänen & Picton, 1987;Näätänen, 2001;Näätänen et al, 2007 for a review), has previously shown sensitivity to differences on the level of phonological representation and has thus been a key component in establishing processing asymmetries such as those discussed above (cf. Eulitz & Lahiri, 2004;Cornell et al, 2011;Roberts et al, 2013;de Jonge & Boersma, 2015;Kotzor et al, 2017;Højlund et al 2019).…”