Aditi Lahiri (University of Oxford)

Phonological systems often appear to be unnecessarily complex. The well-known speaker-listener relationship is fraught with difficulties. The listener has no influence over a speaker’s utterances which, of course, could be extremely variable. Variability occurs on all levels — unusual phonemes, seemingly unreasonable word level constraints and unviable phonological lternations. Nevertheless, the level of variation is constrained, and the ways to deal with it are observable in texts as well as in speech.
We attempt to provide a model which tries to account for the ways in which the variability is channelled to make comprehension possible and change accountable. Diachronic evidence as well as support come from a series of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments on English, German, Swedish, and Bengali.