Sandra Kotzor

Processing of Phonemic Consonant Length: Semantic and Fragment Priming Evidence from Bengali.

Six cross-modal lexical decision tasks with priming probed listeners’ processing of the geminate–singleton 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. This overall asymmetry in the tolerance of geminate nonwords in place of singleton words is attributed to a representational mismatch and points towards a moraic representation of duration. While geminates require a mora which cannot be derived from singleton input, the additional information in geminate nonwords does not create a similar mismatch.

Fluid semantics: Semantic knowledge is experience-based and dynamic

Is our internal notion of, e. g., the object lemon, static? That is, do we have stable semantic representations that remain constant across time? Most semantic memory researchers still (at least tacitly) take a static perspective, assuming that only effects that can be demonstrated across a variety of tasks and contexts should be considered informative about the architecture of the semantic system. This chapter challenges this perspective by highlighting studies showing that the cognitive and neural representations of object concepts are fluid, changing as a consequence of the context that each individual brings with them (e. g., via current goals, recent experience, long-term experience, or neural degeneration). These findings support models of semantic memory in which rather than being static, conceptual representations are dynamic and shaped by experience, whether that experience extends over the lifetime, the task, or the moment.