Psycholinguistics is the study of how language is acquired, represented, and used by the human mind; it draws on knowledge about both language and cognitive processes. A central topic of debate in psycholinguistics concerns the balance between storage and processing. This debate is especially evident in research concerning morphology, which is the study of word structure, and several theoretical issues have arisen concerning the question of how (or whether) morphology is represented and what function morphology serves in the processing of complex words. Five theoretical approaches have emerged that differ substantially in the emphasis placed on the role of morphemic representations during the processing of morphologically complex words. The first approach minimizes processing by positing that all words, even morphologically complex ones, are stored and recognized as whole units, without the use of morphemic representations. The second approach posits that words are represented and processed in terms of morphemic units. The third approach is a mixture of the first two approaches and posits that a whole-access route and decomposition route operate in parallel. A fourth approach posits that both whole word representations and morphemic representations are used, and that these two types of information interact. A fifth approach proposes that morphology is not explicitly represented, but rather, emerges from the co-activation of orthographic/phonological representations and semantic representations. These competing approaches have been evaluated using a wide variety of empirical methods examining, for example, morphological priming, the role of constituent and word frequency, and the role of morphemic position. For the most part, the evidence points to the involvement of morphological representations during the processing of complex words. However, the specific way in which these representations are used is not yet fully known.
Article
Paul de Lacy
Phonology has both a taxonomic/descriptive and cognitive meaning. In the taxonomic/descriptive context, it refers to speech sound systems. As a cognitive term, it refers to a part of the brain’s ability to produce and perceive speech sounds. This article focuses on research in the cognitive domain.
The brain does not simply record speech sounds and “play them back.” It abstracts over speech sounds, and transforms the abstractions in nontrivial ways. Phonological cognition is about what those abstractions are, and how they are transformed in perception and production.
There are many theories about phonological cognition. Some theories see it as the result of domain-general mechanisms, such as analogy over a Lexicon. Other theories locate it in an encapsulated module that is genetically specified, and has innate propositional content. In production, this module takes as its input phonological material from a Lexicon, and refers to syntactic and morphological structure in producing an output, which involves nontrivial transformation. In some theories, the output is instructions for articulator movement, which result in speech sounds; in other theories, the output goes to the Phonetic module. In perception, a continuous acoustic signal is mapped onto a phonetic representation, which is then mapped onto underlying forms via the Phonological module, which are then matched to lexical entries.
Exactly which empirical phenomena phonological cognition is responsible for depends on the theory. At one extreme, it accounts for all human speech sound patterns and realization. At the other extreme, it is little more than a way of abstracting over speech sounds. In the most popular Generative conception, it explains some sound patterns, with other modules (e.g., the Lexicon and Phonetic module) accounting for others. There are many types of patterns, with names such as “assimilation,” “deletion,” and “neutralization”—a great deal of phonological research focuses on determining which patterns there are, which aspects are universal and which are language-particular, and whether/how phonological cognition is responsible for them.
Phonological computation connects with other cognitive structures. In the Generative T-model, the phonological module’s input includes morphs of Lexical items along with at least some morphological and syntactic structure; the output is sent to either a Phonetic module, or directly to the neuro-motor interface, resulting in articulator movement. However, other theories propose that these modules’ computation proceeds in parallel, and that there is bidirectional communication between them.
The study of phonological cognition is a young science, so many fundamental questions remain to be answered. There are currently many different theories, and theoretical diversity over the past few decades has increased rather than consolidated. In addition, new research methods have been developed and older ones have been refined, providing novel sources of evidence. Consequently, phonological research is both lively and challenging, and is likely to remain that way for some time to come.
Article
Yvan Rose
Child phonology refers to virtually every phonetic and phonological phenomenon observable in the speech productions of children, including babbles. This includes qualitative and quantitative aspects of babbled utterances as well as all behaviors such as the deletion or modification of the sounds and syllables contained in the adult (target) forms that the child is trying to reproduce in his or her spoken utterances. This research is also increasingly concerned with issues in speech perception, a field of investigation that has traditionally followed its own course; it is only recently that the two fields have started to converge. The recent history of research on child phonology, the theoretical approaches and debates surrounding it, as well as the research methods and resources that have been employed to address these issues empirically, parallel the evolution of phonology, phonetics, and psycholinguistics as general fields of investigation. Child phonology contributes important observations, often organized in terms of developmental time periods, which can extend from the child’s earliest babbles to the stage when he or she masters the sounds, sound combinations, and suprasegmental properties of the ambient (target) language. Central debates within the field of child phonology concern the nature and origins of phonological representations as well as the ways in which they are acquired by children. Since the mid-1900s, the most central approaches to these questions have tended to fall on each side of the general divide between generative vs. functionalist (usage-based) approaches to phonology. Traditionally, generative approaches have embraced a universal stance on phonological primitives and their organization within hierarchical phonological representations, assumed to be innately available as part of the human language faculty. In contrast to this, functionalist approaches have utilized flatter (non-hierarchical) representational models and rejected nativist claims about the origin of phonological constructs. Since the beginning of the 1990s, this divide has been blurred significantly, both through the elaboration of constraint-based frameworks that incorporate phonetic evidence, from both speech perception and production, as part of accounts of phonological patterning, and through the formulation of emergentist approaches to phonological representation. Within this context, while controversies remain concerning the nature of phonological representations, debates are fueled by new outlooks on factors that might affect their emergence, including the types of learning mechanisms involved, the nature of the evidence available to the learner (e.g., perceptual, articulatory, and distributional), as well as the extent to which the learner can abstract away from this evidence. In parallel, recent advances in computer-assisted research methods and data availability, especially within the context of the PhonBank project, offer researchers unprecedented support for large-scale investigations of child language corpora. This combination of theoretical and methodological advances provides new and fertile grounds for research on child phonology and related implications for phonological theory.
Article
Andrew Hippisley
The morphological machinery of a language is at the service of syntax, but the service can be poor. A request may result in the wrong item (deponency), or in an item the syntax already has (syncretism), or in an abundance of choices (inflectional classes or morphological allomorphy). Network Morphology regulates the service by recreating the morphosyntactic space as a network of information sharing nodes, where sharing is through inheritance, and inheritance can be overridden to allow for the regular, irregular, and, crucially, the semiregular. The network expresses the system; the way the network can be accessed expresses possible deviations from the systematic. And so Network Morphology captures the semi-systematic nature of morphology. The key data used to illustrate Network Morphology are noun inflections in the West Slavonic language Lower Sorbian, which has three genders, a rich case system and three numbers. These data allow us to observe how Network Morphology handles inflectional allomorphy, syncretism, feature neutralization, and irregularity. Latin deponent verbs are used to illustrate a Network Morphology account of morphological mismatch, where morphosyntactic features used in the syntax are expressed by morphology regularly used for different features. The analysis points to a separation of syntax and morphology in the architecture of the grammar. An account is given of Russian nominal derivation which assumes such a separation, and is based on viewing derivational morphology as lexical relatedness. Areas of the framework receiving special focus include default inheritance, global and local inheritance, default inference, and orthogonal multiple inheritance. The various accounts presented are expressed in the lexical knowledge representation language DATR, due to Roger Evans and Gerald Gazdar.
Article
Agustín Vicente and Ingrid L. Falkum
Polysemy is characterized as the phenomenon whereby a single word form is associated with two or several related senses. It is distinguished from monosemy, where one word form is associated with a single meaning, and homonymy, where a single word form is associated with two or several unrelated meanings. Although the distinctions between polysemy, monosemy, and homonymy may seem clear at an intuitive level, they have proven difficult to draw in practice.
Polysemy proliferates in natural language: Virtually every word is polysemous to some extent. Still, the phenomenon has been largely ignored in the mainstream linguistics literature and in related disciplines such as philosophy of language. However, polysemy is a topic of relevance to linguistic and philosophical debates regarding lexical meaning representation, compositional semantics, and the semantics–pragmatics divide.
Early accounts treated polysemy in terms of sense enumeration: each sense of a polysemous expression is represented individually in the lexicon, such that polysemy and homonymy were treated on a par. This approach has been strongly criticized on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Since at least the 1990s, most researchers converge on the hypothesis that the senses of at least many polysemous expressions derive from a single meaning representation, though the status of this representation is a matter of vivid debate: Are the lexical representations of polysemous expressions informationally poor and underspecified with respect to their different senses? Or do they have to be informationally rich in order to store and be able to generate all these polysemous senses?
Alternatively, senses might be computed from a literal, primary meaning via semantic or pragmatic mechanisms such as coercion, modulation or ad hoc concept construction (including metaphorical and metonymic extension), mechanisms that apparently play a role also in explaining how polysemy arises and is implicated in lexical semantic change.
