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This study investigated a method used to determine whether children were using implicit phonology in making a choice between phonologically legal and illegal nonwords. An additional aspect was also investigated, this being the role of association value in making a choice. In Experiment 1, which used the original pairings found in Messer (1967), it was found that adults prefered the legal nonwords over the illegal nonwords. These are the same results which were found by Messer using children as subjects. An additional analysis was done, and it was found that subjects used association values in making a judgment only when the stimuli were phonologically legal. In Experiment 2, when both members of the pair were either legal or illegal and one had a high associative value and one had a low associative value, it was found that subjects used association values in making a judgment only when both members of the pair were legal. In Experiment 3 the legal member of the pair had a low associative value while the illegal member had a high associative value. It was found that there was not a preference for either member of the pair. In Experiment 4, the legal and illegal members of each pair had approximately the same associative value, and the legal member of the pair was prefered over the illegal member. The results of these four experiments were related to the internal lexicon and hypotheses made about it by Rubenstein, Lewis and Rubenstein (1971). / Master of Science

This dissertation proposes a formal model of phonological performance, Double Lookup, that also has empirical consequences for theories of phonological competence. The most significant of these is the Productivity Hypothesis, the claim that the ordering of rules derives from their relative productivity. According to Double Lookup, the use of phonological knowledge during speech production occurs in two steps. First, forms are retrieved from memory; second, phonological rules are retrieved from memory and applied, if appropriate, to the retrieved forms. Phonological patterns may be applied during speech in this way or be prepatterned (stored as patterns across lexical items in memory). The productivity of a rule is defined to be the likelihood of its being retrieved and applied during speech production. In general, less productive rules are more likely to be prepatterned than more productive rules. The Productivity Hypothesis then follows: Because prepatterned forms are retrieved before rules are retrieved and applied, less productive rules will be ordered before more productive rules. Double Lookup and the Productivity Hypothesis are tested in several ways. First it is shown that the ordering of partially productive rules in English, as determined using standard linguistic methods, corresponds with their ranking in productivity, as determined through experiments described in the literature and through original surveys of speech errors. The application of fully productive rules in English is also shown to be consistent with the Productivity Hypothesis; fully productive rules do not apply in a linear sequence, but rather interact in accordance with universal principles. All apparent counterexamples actually involve less than fully productive rules. Next it is shown that the phenomenon referred to in the literature as cyclicity is correctly predicted to arise under certain well-defined circumstances, as when a rule is both prepatterned and very productive. In addition, it is shown that there are large categories of examples that cannot be handled by the notion of cyclicity at all, but find a simple account within Double Lookup. Finally, evidence for the model is summarized by comparing it with other models of rule ordering which face conceptual and empirical problems Double Lookup avoids.

This dissertation presents experimental research on speech errors in Tunisian Arabic (TA). The central empirical questions revolve around properties of `exchange errors'. These errors can mis-order lexical, morphological, or sound elements in a variety of patterns. TA's nonconcatenative morphology shows interesting interactions of phrasal and lexical constraints with morphological structure during language production and affords different and revealing error potentials linking the production system with linguistic knowledge.The dissertation studies expand and test generalizations based on Abd-El-Jawad and Abu-Salim's (1987) study of spontaneous speech errors in Jordanian Arabic by experimentally examining apparent regularities in data from real-time language processing perspective. The studies address alternative accounts of error phenomena that have figured prominently in accounts of production processing. Three experiments were designed and conducted based on an error elicitation paradigm used by Ferreira and Humphreys (2001). Experiment 1 tested within-phrase exchange errors focused on root versus non-root exchanges and lexical versus non-lexical outcomes for root and non-root errors. Experiments 2 and 3 addressed between-phrase exchange errors focused on violations of the Grammatical Category Constraint (GCC).The study of exchange potentials for the within-phrase items (experiment 1) contrasted lexical and non-lexical outcomes. The expectation was that these would include a significant number of root exchanges and that the lexical status of the resulting forms would not preclude error. Results show that root and vocalic pattern exchanges were very rare and that word forms rather than root forms were the dominant influence in the experimental performance. On the other hand, the study of exchange errors across phrasal boundaries of items that do or do not correspond in grammatical category (experiments 2 and 3) pursued two principal questions, one concerning the error rate and the second concerning the error elements. The expectation was that the errors predominantly come from grammatical category matches. That outcome would reinforce the interpretation that processing operations reflect the assignment of syntactically labeled elements to their location in phrasal structures. Results corroborated with the expectation. However, exchange errors involving words of different grammatical categories were also frequent. This has implications for speech monitoring models and the automaticity of the GCC.