Neurolinguistic correlates in processing phonological stem-variants of complex words

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Carsten Eulitz
• Co-Applicant: Professorin Aditi Lahiri, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2006 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 25207070

A central issue in speech recognition is how contrastive phonemic Information is stored in the mental lexicon. Using the mismatch negativity, a component of the event-related brain activity which is sensitive to language-specific phoneme representations, we have shown that the human brain refers to abstract underspecified representations where not all phonemic features are stored. This has been shown for the coronal place of articulation in vowels as predicted by the Featurally Underspecified Lexicon-model (FUL). The planned experiments will build an our previous research to (i) extend our observations for vowels in isolation to those in more complex phonological contexts with consonantal onsets and codas; (ii) study the effect of lexical status an the mismatch negativity when investigating the segmental level of phonology; and (iii) ascertain further neurobiological evidence for the underspecification of other phonological features related to the manner of articulation like stridency, nasality and voicing, which are regularly used to contrast speech sounds in natural language.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1234: Phonological and Phonetic Competence: Between Grammar, Signal Processing and Neural Activity
• International Connection: United Kingdom