Word recognition: do we need phonological representations?

Under what format(s) are spoken words memorized by the brain? Are word forms stored as abstract phonological representations? Or rather, are they stored as detailed acoustic-phonetic representations? (For example as a set of acoustic exemplars associated with each word). We present a series of experiments whose results point to the existence of prelexical phonological processes in word recognition and suggest that spoken words are accessed using a phonological code

Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma & Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies

Prelexical Locus Of An Illusory Vowel Effect In Japanese

Studies in vision have demonstrated that the visual system can induce the perception of illusory contours. In this study we document a similar phenomenon in the auditory mode: Japanese speakers report perceiving vowels that are absent in the acoustic signal. Such an illusion is due to the fact that in Japanese, succession of consonants are not allowed. Hence the linguistic system inserts an illusory vowel between adjacent vowels in order to conform to the expected pattern in this language. Here, we manipulate the lexical neighborhood of nonwords that contain illegal consonant clusters and show that this illusion is not due to lexical influence. Rather, it arises before lexical knowledge is activated, suggesting that phonotactics impact perception routines at a very early processing stage