Interlanguage Segmental Mapping as Evidence for the Nature of Lexical Representation

Abstract

AbstractThe traditional view of phonological representation assumes that lexical representation is economical and free of redundancy and that a phoneme is represented as a combination of contrastive phonetic features. The traditional view, however, is challenged by the recent developments in phonological theories. In Optimality Theory, the distinction between contrastive vs. non‐contrastive aspects of pronunciation is made not by the lexical representation but by the constraint ranking and the commonly adopted principle of Lexicon Optimization requires lexical representation to be as close to the surface representation as possible. An exemplar model of phonology also assumes that predictable and redundant phonetic properties are also specified in the lexical representation and that each contextual variant of a phoneme forms a separate phonetic category. The current paper reviews recent studies on segmental mapping in interlanguage phonology, examines the nature of the L1 phonological representation that the mapping crucially refers to, and discusses how the interlanguage data bear on the debate on the nature of the lexical representation.