The effect of phonological and morphological overlap on the processing of Bengali words (original) (raw)
Related papers
Processing of Phonemic Consonant Length: Semantic and Fragment Priming Evidence from Bengali
Language and Speech, 2015
Six cross-modal lexical decision tasks with priming probed listeners' processing of the geminatesingleton contrast in Bengali, where duration alone leads to phonemic contrast ([pata] 'leaf' vs. [pat:a] 'whereabouts'), in order to investigate the phonological representation of consonantal duration in the lexicon. Four form-priming experiments (auditory fragment primes and visual targets) were designed to investigate listeners' sensitivity to segments of conflicting duration. Each prime derived from a real word ([kʰɔm]/[gʰenː]) was matched with a mispronunciation of the opposite duration (*[kʰɔmː]/*[gʰen]) and both were used to prime the full words [kʰɔma] ('forgiveness') and [gʰenːa] ('disgust') respectively. Although all fragments led to priming, the results showed an asymmetric pattern. The fragments of words with singletons mispronounced as geminates led to equal priming, while those with geminates mispronounced as singletons showed a difference. The priming effect of the real-word geminate fragment was significantly greater than that of its corresponding nonword singleton fragment. In two subsequent semantic priming tasks with full-word primes a stronger asymmetry was found: nonword geminates (*[kʰɔmːa]) primed semantically related words ([marjona] 'forgiveness') but singleton nonword primes (*[gʰena]) did not show priming.
Asymmetries in the processing of affixed words in Bengali
Language, 2021
Prefixes and suffixes display distinctive linguistic behaviors. Not only does a crosslinguistic asymmetry exist between them in terms of structural properties, combinatorial constraints, and frequency, but there is also extensive evidence that prefixes and suffixes are processed differently. To further investigate the differences in how prefixes and suffixes are processed, we conducted five crossmodal priming experiments in Bengali, a language rich in derivational morphology. Although all combinations of stems, prefixes, and suffixes provided facilitation, we found that stems primed related prefixed forms to a greater degree than they primed related suffixed forms. Furthermore, morphologically related prefixed forms primed other prefixed forms more than suffixed forms primed related suffixed forms. On the basis of these findings, we propose that the asymmetry in how prefixes and suffixes are processed is due not only to differences in perception, reading, and inhibition from the phonological cohort, but also to the salience of the morpheme boundaries in affixed word representations during recognition.*
Bengali nasal vowels: lexical representation and listener perception
Phonetica
This paper focuses on the question of the representation of nasality as well as speakers’ awareness and perceptual use of phonetic nasalisation by examining surface nasalisation in two types of vowels in Bengali: underlying nasal vowels (CṼC) and nasalised vowels before a nasal consonant (CVN). A series of three cross-modal forced-choice experiments was used to investigate the hypothesis that only unpredictable nasalisation is stored and that this sparse representation governs how listeners interpret vowel nasality. Visual full-word targets were preceded by auditory primes consisting of CV segments of CVC words with nasal vowels ([tʃɑ̃] for [tʃɑ̃d] ‘moon’), oral vowels ([tʃɑ] for [tʃɑl] ‘unboiled rice’) or nasalised oral vowels ([tʃɑ̃(n)] for [tʃɑ̃n] ‘bath’) and reaction times and errors were measured. Some targets fully matched the prime while some matched surface or underlying representation only. Faster reaction times and fewer errors were observed after CṼC primes compared to bo...
A comparison of the acoustics of nonsense and real word stimuli: Coronal stops in Bengali
2015
Research suggests that nonsense and real words often exhibit differences in their acoustic properties. Despite this, the use of nonsense stimuli is prevalent in acoustic analyses of a range of phenomena and in experimental studies of segmental perception. The present study examined stop duration and preceding vowel formant transitions for two Bengali coronal stops produced in real and nonsense word stimuli. Firstly, significant differences were observed based on the stimulus type. Nonsense word production showed more distinct dental-retroflex differentiation. Secondly, the results revealed that F3 was a more reliable cue to place of articulation than closure duration and voice onset time.
Word formation in Bengali : a whole word morphological description and its theoretical implications
2007
The present thesis has two agendas: I) it presents a morphologicai description of Bengali, an Indo-European language spoken in South Asia and eventually ii) examines whether the W(hole) W(ord) M(orphological) theory developed by Aian Ford & Rajendra Singh of the University of Montreal (cf. Ford, Singh & Martohardjono 1997) s an adequate model for such descriptions. WWM daims that words do not have any internai hierarchical structure. Implicitly, units smailer than word (such as stem or affix) cannot exist and there is no need for multiple morphology like compounding, derivation, infiection or reduplication. A typical WWM view would be that a good number of words of some lexicon are formaiiy and/or categorically different and semanticaily related to each other. Whenever there exist at ieast two pairs of words based on the same formai difference, categorical affiHation and semantic relatedness (cf. Singh 1992) a particular strategy becomes part of the morphological module of the speak...
Computational Models of the Representation of Bangla Compound Words in the Mental Lexicon
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2015
In this paper we aim to model the organization and processing of Bangla compound words in the mental lexicon. Our objective is to determine whether the mental lexicon access a Bangla compound word as a whole or decomposes the whole word into its constituent morphemes and then recognize them accordingly. To address this issue, we adopted two different strategies. First, we conduct a cross-modal priming experiment over a number of native speakers. Analysis of reaction time (RT) and error rates indicates that in general, Bangla compound words are accessed via partial decomposition process. That is some word follows full-listing mode of representation and some words follow the decomposition route of representation. Next, based on the collected RT data we have developed a computational model that can explain the processing phenomena of the access and representation of Bangla compound words. In order to achieve this, we first explored the individual roles of head word position, morphological complexity, orthographic transparency and semantic compositionality between the constituents and the whole compound word. Accordingly, we have developed a complexity based model by combining these features together. To a large extent we have successfully explained the possible processing phenomena of most of the Bangla compound words. Our proposed model shows an accuracy of around 83 %.
Role of markedness in the perception of Bengali stops
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America
Markedness is a theory that was developed on the basis of segmental patterns observed in speech output and has primarily been addressed in regard to speech production in previous studies. According to the Markedness Theory, marked segments are more difficult to produce due to an additional property or “mark” which requires more articulatory effort. However, its effects on speech perception are not discussed in the previous literature. This study examines the role of markedness in perception with Bengali stops. Bengali stops involve two types of markedness or additional properties, voicing and aspiration. Voiced stops (represented as D) are marked with respect to voiceless stops (represented as T), and aspirated stops (TH) are marked with respect to unaspirated stops (T). Voiced aspirated stops bear both additional properties (represented as DH). While the absence of a marked property may make segments easier to produce than those with the property, the question addressed here is whe...
2020
Acoustically, English lexical stress is multidimensional and involving manipulation of duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel quality. The current study investigates the acquisition of English lexical stress by L1 Bengali speakers at the phonological level in terms of the properties of acoustic cues. For this purpose, this study compares 20 L1 Bengali speakers' use of acoustic correlates for the production of English lexical stress in context sentence and neutral frame sentence. The result of this study showed that L1 Bengali speakers were not able to achieve neutral frame sentence like control over duration, intensity, F0 and to a limited extent vowel quality in context sentence. As a result, unlike neutral frame sentence, L1 Bengali speakers were not sensitive to English lexical stress contrast in context sentence. This analysis reveals that, the difference between the neutral frame and context sentences in terms of L1 Bengali speakers’ realization of phonol...
Exploring the semantic organization of Bangla words in the mental lexicon
Procedia Computer Science, 2017
We conduct different approaches to find out the access strategies and mental representation of semantic word using cross-modal experiment of priming in Bangla Language. We indicate that the words are semantically related triggering the priming effect. We observed that the word recognition time in Bangla language is strongly affected by semantically similar words. Also, it is noted that the average semantically related prime-target word pairs have intermediate priming and semantically unintelligible primetarget word pairs have either less or no priming. Our result appears to ensure existing word recognition and interactive methods where semantic trigger may regulate the processing of words.