Linguistics Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Linguistics, including details on human language, phonetics, syntax, phonology.

Lexical and post-lexical phonological representations in spoken production.

Goldrick M, Rapp B

Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, USA. goldrick@ling.northwestern.edu

Theories of spoken word production generally assume a distinction between at least two types of phonological processes and representations: lexical phonological processes that recover relatively arbitrary aspects of word forms from long-term memory and post-lexical phonological processes that specify the predictable aspects of phonological representations. In this work we examine the spoken production of two brain-damaged individuals. We use their differential patterns of accuracy across the tasks of spoken naming and repetition to establish that they suffer from distinct deficits originating fairly selectively within lexical or post-lexical processes. Independent and detailed analyses of their spoken productions reveal contrasting patterns that provide clear support for a distinction between two types of phonological representations: those that lack syllabic and featural information and are sensitive to lexical factors such as lexical frequency and neighborhood density, and those that include syllabic and featural information and are sensitive to detailed properties of phonological structure such as phoneme frequency and syllabic constituency.

Published 22 December 2006 in Cognition, 102(2): 219-60.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2005-2008 Linguistics Research Today. All Rights Reserved.