Presentation
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Syllables and their beginnings have a special role in the mental lexicon
Poster A44 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Yue Sun1, David Poeppel1,2,3; 1Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2New York University, New York, USA, 3Max Planck-NYU Center for Language, Music, and Emotion (CLaME), New York, USA
How spoken words are stored in the brain is a fascinating question for the understanding of human language. Since words are built as temporal sequences of speech sounds, a relevant but not yet clearly answered question is whether individual speech sounds within these sequences contribute equally to the encoding of words. One widely shared intuition suggests that lexical informativeness decays gradually from the beginning to the end of words, due to the directional nature of time. Meanwhile, ample evidence from psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research demonstrated that perception and production of continuous speech is governed by a critical computational unit: the syllable. This body of work revealed that speech sounds at syllable beginnings (onsets) are more reliably processed than those at syllable endings (codas). Based on the assumption of a functional interplay between speech processing and lexical storage, our study investigates whether the distribution of lexical information among different speech sounds of words is also regulated by the syllable unit. By analyzing lexical databases of 12 typological different languages, we demonstrate that there is a compelling asymmetry between syllable onset and syllable coda in their involvement in distinguishing words stored in the lexicon. In particular, we show that the functional advantage of syllable onset over syllable coda reflects an asymmetrical distribution of lexical informativeness within the syllable unit, but not an effect of a global decay of informativeness from the beginning to the end of a word. Furthermore, employing 3 series of lexicon simulations, we demonstrated that the greater involvement of syllable onset in contrasting words is jointly determined by various streams of phonological and phonotactic regularities that shape the probabilistic distribution of speech sounds across different positions within words. These regularities reflect computational constraints from both the transformations between lexical representations and their corresponding articulatory/acoustic correlates and the mapping between lexical representations to semantic units. Our findings highlight the intricate relationship between the computations in speech operations and the organization of words in the mental lexicon. The converging evidence across languages from a range of typological families supports the conjecture that the syllable unit, while being a critical primitive for both speech perception and production, is also a key organizational constraint for lexical storage.
Topic Areas: Phonology,