Abstract
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular inflected words cannot co-determine the phonetic realization of these inflected words. This study shows that the stem vowels of regular English inflected verb forms that are more frequent in their paradigm are produced with more enhanced articulatory gestures in the midsaggital plane, challenging compositional models of lexical processing. The effect of paradigmatic probability dovetails well with the Paradigmatic Enhancement Hypothesis and is consistent with a growing body of research indicating that the whole is more than its parts.
Highlights
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the lexicon in which complex words are composed during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents
When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to irregular words, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular inflected words should not codetermine the phonetic realization of these inflected words
This study shows that the stem vowels of more frequent regular English inflected verb forms are produced with more enhanced articulatory gestures in the midsaggital plane, challenging strictly compositional models of the lexicon and lexical processing
Summary
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are composed during speech production from (and decomposed during comprehension into) sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents (see Ramscar and Port 2016, for a critical review). When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to irregular words, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular inflected words should not codetermine the phonetic realization of these inflected words. This study shows that the stem vowels of more frequent regular English inflected verb forms are produced with more enhanced articulatory gestures in the midsaggital plane, challenging strictly compositional models of the lexicon and lexical processing. We discuss the challenges for compositional theories posed by a growing body of literature that documents how the phonetic detail of regular complex words is to some extent predictable from whole-word properties, including whole-word frequency. The core of this study is a production experiment using electromagnetic articulography to study tongue movements in the midsaggital plane for two stem vowels in English regular inflected verb forms. In the General Discussion, we reflect on the implications of these findings, which are consistent with a growing body of research reporting that the whole is more than its parts, for both linguistic and cognitive theories of the lexicon
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