Abstract
The nature of phonological representations has been extensively studied in phonology and psycholinguistics. While full specification is still the norm in psycholinguistic research, underspecified representations may better account for perceptual asymmetries. In this paper, we report on a mismatch negativity (MMN) study with Dutch listeners who took part in a passive oddball paradigm to investigate when the brain notices the difference between expected and observed vowels. In particular, we tested neural discrimination (indicating perceptual discrimination) of the tense mid vowel pairs /o/-/ø/ (place contrast), /e/-/ø/ (labiality or rounding contrast), and /e/-/o/ (place and labiality contrast). Our results show (a) a perceptual asymmetry for place in the /o/-/ø/ contrast, supporting underspecification of [CORONAL] and replicating earlier results for German, and (b) a perceptual asymmetry for labiality for the /e/-/ø/ contrast, which was not reported in the German study. A labial deviant [ø] (standard /e/) yielded a larger MMN than a deviant [e] (standard /ø/). No asymmetry was found for the two-feature contrast. This study partly replicates a similar MMN study on German vowels, and partly presents new findings indicating cross-linguistic differences. Although the vowel inventory of Dutch and German is to a large extent comparable, their (morpho)phonological systems are different, which is reflected in processing.
Highlights
There is considerable acoustic variation in natural speech, making recognition of spoken words or even single vowels rather complex
The present paper set out to test whether Dutch listeners show the same perceptual asymmetries as German listeners in an mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm in which three vowel pairs were investigated
We found significant asymmetries for both onefeature contrasts, but no significant asymmetry was found for our twofeature contrast (/e, o/)
Summary
There is considerable acoustic variation in natural speech, making recognition of spoken words or even single vowels rather complex. The phonological underlying representations of words, and phonemes, in our mental lexicon are made up of phonological features that play a crucial role in recognition. Some theories assume rich phonetic detail to be part of stored representations (e.g., Johnson, 1997; Goldinger, 1998; Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2002; Polka and Bohn, 2003, 2011; Masapollo et al, 2017a,b), while others only assume the essential features needed to differentiate between lexical contrasts (e.g., Chomsky and Halle, 1968; Archangeli, 1988; Lahiri and Reetz, 2002; Dresher, 2009). One model that makes very explicit assumptions as to which phonological features are stored in the underlying representations in the mental lexicon is the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) model (e.g., Lahiri and Reetz, 2002, 2010; Lahiri, 2018)
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