Previous Grants

Morphology

This study used an experimental approach to explore the morphological structure of so-called 'zero-derived' items in English -- words that can act as members of more than one lexical class without any formal change (e.g. to walk/a walk).

The first set of experiments aimed to discover evidence that, in the minds of native speakers, one item in such pairs is marked as being derived from the other.

The second set of experiments investigated the theory that some of these items are not in fact in a derivational relationship, but are instead two uses of a single root which is underspecified for lexical class.

Production

Professor Aditi Lahiri previously had an ESRC project with Dr Linda Wheeldon to investigate phonological encoding in language production, one of the issues being the relationship between the time it takes to begin an utterance and the nature of the initial constituent which the speaker plans to articulate.

Research on language comprehension addresses the nature of the phonological representation in the mental lexicon. Typically, behavioural reaction time experiments, as well as EEG studies, may be conducted to address a variety of these research issues.