1Phonological Alternation, Lexical Neighborhood Density and Markedness in Processing

Phonological alternation results in non-identical surface forms of morphemes. For final devoicing alternations in Turkish and Catalan, and vowel reduction alternation in Catalan, stems with fewer than about 4 phonemes are much less likely to contain alternating phonemes than larger stems. This suggests that phonological alternation may be crosslinguistically marked in small stems. Small morphemes are more likely to be found in dense lexical neighborhoods. Lexical entries with many near neighbors have been shown to be processed less rapidly and accurately than those with few neighbors. Under several models of lexicon structure, phonological alternation may be expected to exacerbate the negative influence of high neighborhood density on processing, with the result that alternation should be relatively marked in dense neighborhoods. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that small morphemes that do show alternation inhabit less dense neighborhoods on average than those that do not. Evidence is presented that the preference for non-alternation in small stems has been grammaticalized in Turkish. However, the grammar does not appear to make reference to neighborhood density per se, but rather syllable number—which is shown to be a good, but not perfect, predictor of neighborhood density. 21. Phonological alternation is not evenly distributed across the lexicon • Phonological Alternation: Phonological context dependent change in the surface form of a phoneme