The Phonology/Morphology Interface

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the phonology/morphology interface to reveal how phonological matters are critical to understanding aspects of morphological behaviour in bilinguals. The chapter begins with an exploration of why certain L2 morphemes are omitted in production via the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis. The framework of Distributed Morphology is introduced to explain aspects of the bilingual lexicon. Traditional psycholinguistic experimental results are presented and then discussed within the context of Distributed Morphology: a case study of L2 Swedish data and a case study of L2 German allomorphy. These case studies show the influence of Universal Grammar on the representations selected by the learners. The chapter concludes with a discussion of intraword codeswitching within a Distributed Morphology account and what these data reveal about the architecture of the multilingual grammar.