Psycho-Neuro Meeting - Tessa Culleton / Mutation and Neutralization in Ulster Irish
Psycho-Neuro Meeting - Tessa Culleton / Mutation and Neutralization in Ulster Irish
Wednesday October 1, Tessa leads the Psycho-Neuro Meeting with initial results and future prospects for her work on phonological processes of mutation in Ulster Irish, and their mental representation, abstracted below.
Mutation and Neutralization in Ulster Irish
Initial consonant mutation, a syntactically conditioned change in initial consonant quality, is a productive and wide-spread process in Irish. Consonant mutations can result in some amount of homophony at word beginnings (which are critical according to most theories of word recognition processes). For example, a word-initial /b/ in some mutation environments is mutated to [m], even when [m] from an underlying /m/ occurs in the same phonological environments. In my fieldwork this past summer I collected recordings from native Irish speakers with the goal of learning whether mutations are completely neutralizing. I will discuss some theories of mental representations in phonology that this work can begin to address. I will also share ideas for future experiments aiming to investigate whether any (if any are found) acoustic differences are perceptible to listeners and how listeners make decisions in these (totally or partially) ambiguous situations.