Lexical organization and Welsh consonant mutations

Abstract

The role of phonological form in the lexical organization of morphologically related words is investigated using consonant mutations in Welsh. Consonant mutations are a regular form of nonaffixal morphology, in which the initial consonant of a word changes depending on its syntactic context; for instance, the word pont “bridge” may appear as bont or font. In English, it has been shown that affixal variants, such as POUR-POURED, prime each other strongly, while nonaffixal variants, such as HUNG-HANG, show weak or nonexistent priming ( S. T. Kempley & J. Morton (1982) British Journal of Psychology, 73, 441–454; R. F. Stanners, J. J. Neiser, W. P. Hernon, & R. Hall (1979) Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 399–412). Using the task of auditory repetition priming, we show that mutation is similar to affixing in English in that mutated variants prime each other. We further show that abstract morphological categories, rather than identity of phonological form, are required to organize the Welsh lexicon, thus suggesting that current phonologically based lexical models need to be revised. An alternative model utilizing an underspecified autosegmental representation is proposed.