Spelling, pronunciation and morphological structure

• Applicant: Dr. Julia Muschalik
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273681275

Although it has been repeatedly suggested in the literature that writing, typing and speaking rely on the same underlying processing architecture, language production has predominantly been studied based on evidence from spoken language. One of the main reasons is that, traditionally, it is assumed that writing abilities are acquired much later in life compared to speaking and that, hence, lexical access to orthographic information is largely dependent on phonological access. However, recently evidence is accumulating that orthographic information directly influences articulation, a finding that challenges traditional views of the subordinate role of orthography in language production. At the same time, a number of studies presents evidence for how morphological structure exerts influence on spelling and writing. This is another finding that can hardly be accommodated by traditional models of speech production. Yet, studies that combine the perspectives of phonology, morphology and orthography are still scarce and more evidence is needed for how orthography interacts with both phonology and morphology in language production.The main objective of this project is to provide this type of evidence for the interaction of orthography with both pronunciation and morphology. We aim at widening the scope of the Research Unit by transferring some of the pertinent questions to a different, yet intricately related research domain: orthographic representations and written language production. Using both corpus and experimental data, we will investigate the role of orthographic representations in language production from a twofold perspective by looking at i) spelling effects on the pronunciation of complex words and ii) morphological effects on spelling and typing of complex words.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2373: Spoken Morphology: Phonetics and phonology of complex words
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Susanne Gahl, Ph.D.