BEHAVIOR REFLECTS THE (DEGREE OF) REALITY OF PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES IN THE BRAIN AS WELL

To assess the reality of phonological features in language processing (vs. language description), one needs to specify the distinctive claims of distinctive-feature theory. Two of the more far-reaching claims are compositionality and generalizability. I will argue that there is some evidence for the first and evidence against the second claim from a recent behavioral paradigm. Highlighting the contribution of a behavioral paradigm also counterpoints the use of brain measures as the only way to elucidate what is "real for the brain". The contributions of the speakers exemplify how brain measures can help us to understand the reality of phonological features in language processing. The evidence is, however, not convincing for a) the claim for underspecification of phonological features—which has to deal with counterevidence from behavioral as well as brain measures—, and b) the claim of position independence of phonological features. 1. WHAT IS SPECIAL ABOUT PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES? Listeners respond categorically differently to sentences such as "hand me your gun " and "hand me your gum". Any model of speech processing must be able to explain this fact. Episodic models without a role for phonological features [9] differ from distinctive-feature theory most prominently with regard to the assumptions of compositionality and generalizability. According to distinctive-feature theory, the difference between gun and gum is a difference in place of articulation and hence the same as the following differences: • run and rum (generalizing over words) • nail and mail (generalizing over positions) • coat and cope (generalizing over manner) This last point also highlights the perhaps most far-reaching claim of distinctive-feature theory, the compositionality of distinctive features, which allows one to explain the phonological system of a language with just a few features. A middle ground is a segmental (phonemic, demi-syllabic, moraic, etc.) model, in which the difference between /d / and /b / is independent from the difference between /n / and /m/