Competition between whole-word and decomposed representations of English prefixed words

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Zuraw, Kie | Lin, Isabelle | Yang, Meng | Peperkamp, Sharon

Edité par CCSD ; Springer Verlag -

International audience. English aspiration is influenced by word structure: in general, a voiceless stop following s is unaspirated (des[t]royed), but it can be aspirated if a prefix-stem boundary intervenes (dis[tʰ]rusts) (Baker, Smith & Hawkins 2007). In a production study of 110 words prefixed with dis-or mis-, we show that even in prefixed words, there is variation (dis[k]laimers ~ dis[kʰ]laimers), and that aspiration in such words is correlated with word and stem frequency. The more frequent the word, the less likely aspiration, but the more frequent the stem, the more likely aspiration. This contrasting frequency effect is characteristic of the type of competition Hay posits between whole-word lexical access and morphologically decomposed lexical access (Hay 2003): frequent words will tend to be accessed as wholes (and therefore behave as though there is no prefix-stem boundary), but frequent stems will encourage decomposed, prefix + stem access. In order to test whether there is active online competition, as opposed to simply frequency effects that are somehow lexicalized, we also conduct a priming experiment. We find that exposing participants to other prefixed words encourages them to aspirate target words, as compared to when they have been exposed to similar but non-prefixed words. These results provide evidence for active online competition.

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