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Stephen Politzer-Ahles will be presenting this Colloquy on "The Quest for KÁ: Exploring the  Mental Representation of Allomorphic Variants”.  His abstract is provided below.

 

For the past 10-ish years I have been engaged in an on-again, off-again struggle to figure out whether Mandarin speakers react to ká (and some other syllables like it) like it's a real word or a nonword. While this sounds like a random and very niche question, in this talk I will discuss why it's actually interesting and important, and I will review some past experimental attempts to answer it and why they didn't work, as well as some recent work. We will see that these syllables are important to investigate because they're syllables that don't exist as citation forms of any word, only as surface variants, and therefore different theories of lexical representation make different predictions about how they would be processed. We will also see that the [so far unsuccessful] attempt to answer this question about these syllables has actually led to unexpected insights about other aspects of language processing.

 

A Zoom link is available upon request.  Please email linguistics@ku.edu

  • Hamed Zakizadeh
  • Nabil Azadi

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