Interlanguage Segmental Mapping as Evidence for the Nature of Lexical Representation

The traditional view of phonological representation assumes that lexical representation is economical and free of redundancy and that a phoneme is represented as a combination of contrastive phonetic features. The traditional view, however, is challenged by the recent developments in phonological theories. In Optimality Theory, the distinction between contrastive vs. non-contrastive aspects of pronunciation is made not by the lexical representation but by the constraint ranking and the commonly adopted principle of Lexicon Optimization requires lexical representation to be as close to the surface representation as possible. An exemplar model of phonology also assumes that predictable and redundant phonetic properties are also specified in the lexical representation and that each contextual variant of a phoneme forms a separate phonetic category. The current paper reviews recent studies on segmental mapping in interlanguage phonology, examines the nature of the L1 phonological representation that the mapping crucially refers to, and discusses how the interlanguage data bear on the debate on the nature of the lexical representation. 1. Views on Lexical Representation and the Status of the Phoneme The traditional view of lexical representation in generative phonology assumes that human memory capacity is limited and that lexical representation should be economical (Halle and Clements 1983). The lexical representation should only contain unpredictable information and all predictable details should be derived by rules or constraints. Storing any predictable details of surface pronunciation is equated with incorrectly declaring them unpredictable. As phonetic properties of a segment that are not contrastive are excluded from lexical representation, a given phoneme has a consistent representation across contexts regardless of their differing allophonic realizations at the surface. For example, the coronal stops in [t]op and s[t]op are represented uniformly in the lexical representation, as /t/, because aspiration is not contrastive in English stops. Different models of feature underspecification limit the amount of lexical specification to a different degree (Steriade 1987; Archangeli 1988; Avery and Rice 1989; Dresher 2003)