MORPHOLOGICAL ENCODING VIA PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES: FROM PHONETICS TO GRAMMAR

How can the hearing of an inflected verb with an altered vowel activate the root form of that verb in a language with a reasonable complex productive morphology, which rules out storing all word variants? We proposes a single lexical representation for the present tense root vowel in German irregular (strong) verbs which exhibit a surface alternation between []/[a] and [i]/[e] in the 2ND and 3RD PERSON SINGULAR versus other forms. The claim is that the root vowels do not have a place of articulation feature specification in their underlying form. Evidence for this approach comes from two crossmodal priming experiments which compare strong verbs with regular (weak) verbs, the latter without any root vowel alternations. Our hypothesis that the priming pattern solely depends on feature specifications and not on the priming direction (experiment 1