How are words stored in memory? Beyond phones and phonemes (original) (raw)
Related papers
Words, symbols and rich memory
A series of arguments is presented showing that words are not stored in memory in a way that resembles the abstract, phonological code used by orthography or by linguistic analysis. Words are stored in a very concrete, detailed code that includes nonlinguistic information including speaker's voice properties and other auditory details. Thus, memory for language resembles an exemplar memory and abstract descriptions (using letter-like units and speaker-invariant features) are probably computed on the fly whenever needed. One consequence of this hypothesis is that the study of phonology should be the study of generalizations across the speech of a community and that such a description will employ units (segments, syllable types, prosodic patterns, etc.) that are not, themselves, employed as units in speakers' memory for language. That is, the psychological units of language are not useful for description of linguistic generalizations and the study of linguistic generalizations are not useful for storing the language for speaker use.
The Role of Linguistic Knowledge inthe Encoding of Words and Voices in Memory
2013
There is a longstanding tradition in phonetics to conceive of speech as containing both “indexical” and “linguistic” components (Abercrombie, 1967). The linguistic properties of speech support the identification of linguistic (phonemic, lexical, etc.) contrasts, while the indexical properties of speech “reveal personal characteristics of the speaker”, such as their dialect or group membership, their gender, their age, their emotional or mental state, or particular vocal idiosyncrasies unique to that speaker. In Abercrombie's conception, speakers provide a personal "medium" for linguistic messages; this means that certain indexical properties in this medium may be "extra-linguistic". Exemplar theories of speech perception (Johnson, 2007) have emphasized the cognitive utility of not breaking down the signal into independent linguistic and indexical streams. Instead, exemplar theories conjecture that listeners store in memory unanalyzed representations of speech...
A view of phonology from a cognitive and functional perspective 1
While morphosyntax and semantics have been studied from afunctional and cognitive perspective, much less emphasis has been placed on phonological phenomena in these frameworks. This paper proposes a rethinking of phonology , arguing that (i) the lexical representation of words have phonetic substance that is gradually changed by phonetic processes; (ii) the spread of these phonetic changes is at least partly accounted for by the way particular items are used in discourse; (iii) the study of exceptions, marginal phenomena , and subphonemic detail are important to the understanding of how phonological information is stored and processed; (iv) generalizations at the morphological and lexical level have radically different properties than generalizations at the phonetic level, with the former having a cognitive or semantic motivation, while the latter have a motor or physical motivation; and (v) that the best way to model the interaction of generalizations with the lexicon is not by separating rules from lists of items, but rather by conceiving of generalizations as patterns or schemas that emerge from the organization of stored lexical units.
Phonological Similarity Effects Without a Phonological Store: An Individual Differences Model
The feature model of immediate memory ) is applied to an experiment testing individual differences in phonological confusions amongst a group (N=100) of participants performing a verbal memory test. By simulating the performance of an equivalent number of "pseudo-participants" the model fits both the mean performance and the variability within the group. Experimental data show that high-performing individuals are significantly more likely to demonstrate phonological confusions than low performance individuals and this is also true of the model, despite the model's lack of either an explicit phonological store or a performance-linked strategy shift away from phonological storage. It is concluded that a dedicated phonological store is not necessary to explain the basic phonological confusion effect, and the reduction in such an effect can also be explained without requiring a change in encoding or rehearsal strategy or the deployment of a different storage buffer.
2008
A radically new conception of linguistic representations is proposed. The claim is that language is stored in memory in the form of large distributions of specific utterances in a rich high-dimensional space – roughly what is sometimes called exemplar memory. This is the form the brain uses for understanding and creating utterances in real time. In contrast, the abstract, speaker-independent description of language (as modelled by alphabetical orthographies and by linguistic descriptions using the phonetic alphabet) exhibits many structures and patterns that should be viewed as a social institution, maintained and developed by speakers over time, and approximating a discrete system made from components. However, these phenomena, shaped by social as well as articulatory and auditory factors, play no clear role in real-time language processing. The traditional view For about a century, linguists have trusted their intuitions that speech presents itself to our consciousness in the form...
Lexical storage and phonological change
2004
Empirical investigations of the division of labour between storage and computation in language behaviour can be executed in a number of ways. * An obvious one is that of psycholinguistic experimentation. Another way, which will be focused on in this paper, is language change: language change is a psycholinguistic laboratory of nature, a window on how speakers produce and interpret language. For example, if a language loses a phonological rule whereas the effects of that rule are preserved in a number of words, a possible explanation is that the outputs of that rule must have been stored at the stage when the phonological rule was still active, and thus survived after the loss of that rule. The question that I will address in this paper is how far phonological change provides evidence for what kind of phonological information about lexical items is stored in lexical memory. That is, whereas Kiparsky in his early work on phonological change since 1965 (compiled in Kiparsky 1982) focused on phonological change as evidence for the structure of the grammar, I will take a different, extra-grammatical perspective, and ask what we can learn from phonological change about lexical memory. Asking this question is also in line with Kiparsky's conclusion at the end of his book Explanation in Phonology that linguistic change does not provide as directly a window on the structure of the grammar as was hypothesized in Kiparsky (1968a): "Before we can exploit historical evidence for synchronic purposes we need a firm theory of the intervening factors … " (Kiparsky 1982: 234). Lexical storage is certainly one of these intervening factors that deserve more detailed investigation. * I would like to thank Joan Bybee, Sharon Inkelas, Jaap van Marle, and Leo Wetzels for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Acoustic‐phonetic variability and the mental image of a word
Proizvodnja i percepcija govora, 2010
The speaker's articulatory gestures intended to represent a word are supposed to show relatively high variability in spontaneous speech. The word forms may be stored as abstract phonological representations or else they may be characterized by detailed acoustic-phonetic patterns. The aim of this paper is to show the acoustic-phonetic patterns of the Hungarian word akkor (at that time). Ten speakers' recorded spontaneous speech with a total duration of 255 minutes and containing 286 occurrences of akkor were submitted to analysis. Durational and frequency patterns were measured by means of the PRAAT software. The results obtained show higher variability both within and across speakers than it had been expected. Both the durations of the words and those of the speech sounds, as well as the vowel formants, turned out to be significantly different across speakers. In addition, the results showed considerable individual differences as well. The correspondence between variability in the objective acoustic-phonetic data and the flexibility and adaptive nature of the mental image of a word will be discussed.