Phonology and the Lexicon

Presenters: Canaan Breiss

T2TFC3

This workshop will center on how phonologists can build more ecologically valid and empirically robust models of the phonological grammar by integrating a psycholinguistically-informed understanding of lexical representations and dynamics. We will first survey evidence for the phonological contents of the lexicon, drawing on experimental and psycholinguistic evidence, and then discuss a series of case studies where the phonological grammar seems to be influenced by, or make unexpected reference to, lexically-stored properties or paradigm members, including Lexical Conservatism, Paradigm Uniformity, and lexical exceptionality. The emphasis will be on how phonologists can use probabilistic grammar formalisms to jointly model the multiple sources of influence on the data in question. This type of joint modeling can enable the researcher to dissociate the effects of “competence” and “performance” in naturalistic or noisy corpus or experimental data, enabling a clearer understanding of both. The workshop is designed for participants with a comfortable grasp of contemporary phonological theory, basic psycholinguistics, or the desire to learn.

Keywords: Phonology, Psycholinguistics, Variation, Computational Modeling, Lexicon, Probabilistic Models

Presenters

Canaan Breiss

University of Southern California

Canaan Breiss is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. His research is in theoretical, computational, and experimental phonology, with particular interest in learning/acquisition, representation of overlapping and interacting phonological processes, and phonology’s interfaces with (morpho)syntax and the lexicon. He uses a diverse methodological toolkit, including computational and statistical modeling, corpus methods, and behavioral experiments.