Language-specific morphological and metrical structure in speech processing: Comparative psycho- and neurolinguistic investigations of French and German

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This project looks at two major issues in psycholinguistics. The first one concerns segmentation of the speech stream for word recognition, and the second one the role of morphology in accessing and organizing the mental lexicon. Given that there are no clear word boundaries in spoken language, much research has been dedicated to understanding how the speech processing system manages to isolate words. On the other hand, a large body of research on morphology has argued that morphologically complex words are decomposed into morphemes during word recognition. Previous research on morphological processing, however, has mainly dealt with visually presented isolated words. The present project proposes to combine the two aspects of word recognition, i.e., segmentation of the speech stream at word boundaries and segmentation of complex words into component morphemes, to see if auditorily presented morphologically complex words are decomposed and if this decomposition follows general rules of connected speech segmentation. Planned behavioral and EEG experiments will more specifically look at how morphological processing interacts with phonological processing, and if phonological change of the realisation of the stem and the affix influence the decomposition process. In particular, we will see if phonological alternations at morpheme boundaries, such as resyllabification or segment deletion, prevent morphological segmentation. Moreover, further investigations will look at the status of the units activated in the mental lexicon during word recognition. Indeed, even if morphemes are extracted and their representations activated during word identification, it is still necessary to establish if they are represented as words or if they corresponded to another level of representation, as suggested in various theoretical approaches. In a set of behavioural and EEG experiments we will look at the status of morphemes in the mental lexicon, as compared to the status of free words. This collaboration of the German and the French teams will bring together two partners with joint interests in the general research questions on the one hand and complementary methodological expertise on the other, the French partner having a stronger background in psycholinguistics, and the German partner, in neurolinguistics and linguistics.