Ariel Goldberg, Associate Professor Psychology at Tufts, will be speaking at noon on Wednesday, November 14, in the ASH lobby at Hampshire College. A title and abstract of his talk follow.
Title: "Towards a theory of the phonological processing of multimorphemic words: The Heterogeneity of Processing Hypothesis"
Abstract: Although there has been extensive research investigating the lexical aspects of multimorphemic word processing (e.g., whether words are represented in a holistic or decomposed fashion), very little is known about how post-lexical phonological processes operate over multimorphemic words in production. I propose the Heterogeneity of Processing Hypothesis, which takes as its basis a simple observation: since post-lexical phonological processes in general are influenced by lexical properties, the post-lexical processing of morphologically complex words will have multiple lexical influences. Two consequences of this organization are identified: 1) post-lexical representations must be assembled on the fly, binding together phonemes from different morphemes and 2) phonemes inherit different levels of activation depending on the properties of their parent morpheme. I argue that both of these consequences will cause post-lexical processing to vary across the word, that is, processing is predicted to be heterogeneous. In the first case, weaker structural relationships between the phonemes in different morphemes will cause phonological processes to be weaker when acting across morphemes than within. In the second case, different levels of activation will cause each morpheme to have different articulatory properties (e.g., hyperarticulation, vowel space, etc.). I report three studies supporting weaker heteromorphemic processing and morpheme-based levels of activation.
