Speaker
Betty Mousikou
(Reading Education and Development, Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Description
The morphological complexity of a word is thought to affect the time taken to prepare a verbal response. However, whether it also affects its pronunciation is currently under debate. In the present study, we investigated this issue in German using a reading aloud task. Sixty skilled adult readers read aloud 80 nonwords, comprising 40 morphologically-complex nonwords (e.g., HUNDUNG, where “Hund” is a stem, meaning “dog”, and “ung” is a suffix) and 40 paired non-morphological nonwords (e.g., HUNDAT, where “Hund” is a stem but “at” is not a suffix). The acoustic durations of the stems in the two experimental conditions were measured and statistically compared. Stems of morphologically-complex nonwords were realized acoustically with shorter durations than the same stems of their non-morphological counterpart nonwords. Our results suggest that a word’s morphological structure likely influences its pronunciation, thus posing a challenge to traditional theories of speech production, which postulate that phonetic processing does not have access to morphological information.
Primary author
Betty Mousikou
(Reading Education and Development, Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Co-authors
Sascha Schroeder
(Reading Education and Development, Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Tanja Bäumel
(Reading Education and Development, Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
