Post-lexical rules

[Anonymous Student]

It seems that post-lexical rules module work as a kind of phonetic module, in the sense that they include predictable derivations of the phoneme representation (as a surface representation). They perform with an input either from the lexicon entry or from the letter-to-sound module.

[Simon]

That’s right. The rules operate on the phonetic string for a complete sentence output by the letter-to-sound module (which includes the dictionary and the letter-to-sound “rules”, which typically means a classification tree).

The post-lexcial rules rewrite this string to account for contextual effects that only apply when a word is said in context, not in isolation (“citation form”).

Because there are relatively few such effects (at least, only a few that can easily be described in terms of changing the phonetic string), post-lexical rules are usually written by hand.

[Author]

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