TP5 ART

The articulation of morphologically complex words

01.10.2015 bis 30.09.2018

Using articulography, this project will look at the articulation of different kinds of complex words and phenomena in German: co-articulation in compounds, the articulation of interfixes, the articulation of stem vowels in words of different morphological make-up. The general aim is to document the articulatory kinematics of selected morphologically complex words and to use the observed articulation patterns to clarify how morphological structure and morphological relatedness co-determine articulation. One of the more specific questions to be addressed is how acoustic reduction relates to articulatory gestures. In particular it will test for morphologically complex words two competing hypotheses: The smooth signal hypothesis (e.g. Aylett and Turk 2006), predicts that high frequency words are simply shorter versions of low frequency words. The learning hypothesis (e.g. Ramscar et al. 2014), by contrast, predicts that higher frequency words will reveal greater mastery, with more expert articulatory gestures.