This dissertation examines auditory language processing with two emphases: the steps in the processing of an auditory input which identify those characteristics which enable the listener to match the incoming signal to a lexical item, and the morphological and phonological form of lexical entries. Evidence is presented to support the Morphological Parsing Hypothesis, a proposal that inflectional morphemes are recognized prelexically. Moreover, it is shown that the analysis into stem and inflectional affix is evaluated for phonological well-formedness prior to a lexical search for the hypothesized stem (the Prelexical Phonological Checking Hypothesis). Results from an experiment using German surface homophones (with final obstruent devoicing) strengthen the claim of Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson (1991) that lexical entries are stored in the form of underlying phonological representations. Suggestive evidence that lexical entries may be composed of radically underspecified featural representations leads to the proposal of the Specified Feature Priority Hypothesis, a means by which listeners may attend to those portions of the acoustic/phonetic input which provide cues to the underlyingly specified phonological features of the language.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-9049 |
| Date | 01 January 1995 |
| Creators | Carter, Juli Ann |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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