Non-Obligatory Vowel Epenthesis in -Ed Pseudowords: Ambiguity in Syllabification Resolved by Syntax and Suffixation

Abstract

In this study, we consider a number of factors that affect whether psuedowords ending with the suffix -ed are pronounced with an additional syllable. The additional syllable results if vowel epenthesis occurs. Because this process is optional unless -ed is preceded by a dental, an ambiguity in syllabification arises in many cases. in Experiment 1, we found that subjects do occasionally pronounce -ed pseudowords with an additional syllable, although vowel epenthesis for this class of words has been considered to be unproductive (Marchand, 1969). Moreover, as with actual English words, this process occurred when the pseudowords were used in sentences as adjectives, but did not occur when the same pseudo-words were used as verbs. in Experiment 2, we found that addition of the suffixes -ly and -ness increased the likelihood of vowel epenthesis despite the fact that these suffixes generally do not change the pronunciation of the root in Experiment 3, we showed that perceived grammatical category also affected vowel epenthesis; vowel epenthesis was more likely when the pseudowords were used in a preceding sentence with suffixes that adjectives normally take (-ly or -ness) compared to a condition in which the pseudowords were used in an inflectional form of a verb (-es or -ing instead of -ed). The final experiment was a control experiment showing that the results in Experiment 3 were not simply due to priming effects. The results of the experiments on the pronunciation of pseudowords reported here and elsewhere by other investigators suggest that grammatical category information must be included in any complete model of reading aloud. A parallel distributed processing approach that incorporates a grammatical category constraint is discussed.