Cross-linguistic approaches to lexical segmentation

Paper given at the Cross-Linguistic Studies of Morphophonological Processing workshop, Paris, 1984. An examination of the problem of lexical segmentation in order to identify lang-specific & lang-independent properties of lexical processing systems. A potential universal of lexical segmentation is first evaluated for its efficacy across langs. This postlexical segmentation strategy assumes that listeners recognize each word rapidly enough to be able to predict both its offset & the onset of the following word. It is argued that this strategy cannot account for every lexical segmentation decision in utterances in any lang. Listeners must also use other types of segmentation information. Two types of segmentation information, distributional & relational, that appear to vary cross-linguistically, are presented with examples. To exploit this information, listeners must infer word boundaries or boundaries of other domains from events in the signal. The problem posed for current models of spoken word recognition by the integration of such segmentation information with that from the putative postlexical strategy is discussed. 35 References. Modified HA