Universität Bielefeld - Sonderforschungsbereich 360

Competition and Cooperation in Word and Sentence Regeneration

Padraig G. O'Seaghdha, Lehigh University, USA

Tongue twisters are by definition hard to say. Likewise, repeating pairs of similar words (e.g., storage-story) is difficult. This seems to be due to phonological competition in the sequential assignment of segments prior to articulation. Surprisingly, phonological competition also occurs between similar words in simple sentence pairs (e.g., The storage is ready; The story is long). This empirical discovery makes it possible to distinguish between lexico-phonological and morpho-syntactic processes in sentence generation. I will illustrate this with the classic derivational-inflectional morphology contrast while showing that there is a common underlying principle: At the sentence level, competition occurs in assigning conflicting components to syntactic frames; at the word level, competition occurs in assigning segments of similar words to wordshape frames. In both cases, similarity-based cooperation precipitates competition.

Anke Weinberger, 1997-11-03