Morphological effects on pronunciation

Converging, albeit inconsistent, empirical evidence suggests that the morphological structure of a word influences its pronunciation. We investigated this issue using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging in the context of an experimental cognitive psychology paradigm. Scottish speakers were trained on apparently homophonous monomorphemic and bimorphemic novel words (e.g. zord, zorred), and tested on speech production tasks. Monomorphemic items were realised acoustically with shorter durations than bimorphemic items; however, this difference was not statistically significant. Progressive coarticulatory effects were also observed in the monomorphemic condition for some speakers. A dynamic analysis of the articulatory data revealed that the observed differences in the pronunciations of the two types of items could be due to factors other than morphological structure. Our results, albeit inconclusive, make a significant contribution to the literature in this research domain insofar as the presence or absence of morphological effects on pronunciation has important implications for extant theories of speech production.https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs/icphs2015caslpub3961pub81

Dimensions of Linguistic Space: Variation – Multilingualism Conceptualisations Dimensionen des sprachlichen Raums: Variation – Mehrsprachigkeit – Konzeptualisierung

This volume focuses on the use and structure of the German language in Austria. In addition, the aim of the book is to compare the linguistic conditions in Austria with those in other German speaking countries. The 20 articles present current findings from the research fields of variation, contact and perception. Der Band widmet sich schwerpunktmäßig der Verwendung und Struktur der deutschen Sprache in Österreich. Ziel des Sammelbandes ist es außerdem, die sprachlichen Verhältnisse in Österreich mit denjenigen in anderen deutschsprachigen Ländern zu vergleichen. In 20 Beiträgen werden daher aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse aus den Forschungsbereichen Variation, Kontakt und Perzeption vorgestellt