Height and place underspecification in vowels of New Zealand English and German
and its relevance for speech recognition 

Mathias Scharinger
University of Konstanz 

One pertinent question in the area of speech perception has to do with
the assumption of processing differences based on the regularity or
irregularity of complex morphological words. What has to be stored and
what can be computed "on the fly"? The Featurally Underspecified
Lexicon approach (FUL, Lahiri & Reetz, 2002) explores productive
phonological alternations and assumes phonemic representations
whenever possible without denying the storage of marked forms. The
predictions of the model are tested on vowel alternations within the
present tense of German verbs. The results of a series of priming
experiments provide evidence for a phonemic vowel representation in
these alternations, where place and height features are underspecified
in the mental lexicon. Additionally, FUL allows for the description of
diachronic changes in vowel systems. Here, a particularly interesting
phenomenon due to structural similarities to the German vowel
alternation concerns the raising of the short front vowels in New
Zealand English (NZE). In NZE, it seems that a three-way height
distinction for the short front vowels is restructured into a two-way
height distinction. The results of a priming study are in line with
the predictions of FUL. The model is also able to elucidate the
processing of non-NZE words by NZE speakers. Taken together, the
synchronic as well as the diachronic aspect contribute to a model of
speech recognition which takes phonological forms seriously.  The
mapping from the speech signal to the lexical representations and the
diachronic change of the lexical representations themselves is
directly constrained by the feature-based lexicon.