Morphological effects on pronunciation

Petroula Mousikou, Patrycja Strycharczuk, Alice Turk, Kathy Rastle, James Scobbie

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Converging, albeit inconsistent, empirical evidence suggests that the morphological structure of a word influences its pronunciation. We investigated this issue using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging in the context of an experimental cognitive psychology paradigm. Scottish speakers were trained on apparently homophonous monomorphemic and bimorphemic novel words (e.g. zord, zorred), and tested on speech production tasks. Monomorphemic items were realised acoustically with shorter durations than bimorphemic items; however, this difference was not statistically significant. Progressive coarticulatory effects were also observed in the monomorphemic condition for some speakers. A dynamic analysis of the articulatory data revealed that the observed differences in the pronunciations of the two types of items could be due to factors other than morphological structure. Our results, albeit inconclusive, make a significant contribution to the literature in this research domain insofar as the presence or absence of morphological effects on pronunciation has important implications for extant theories of speech production.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
Place of PublicationGlasgow, UK
PublisherThe University of Glasgow
ISBN (Electronic)978-0-85261-941-4
Publication statusPublished - 2015
Event18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences - Glasgow, United Kingdom
Duration: 10 Aug 201514 Aug 2015

Conference

Conference18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityGlasgow
Period10/08/1514/08/15

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