Subjective perception of affixation: A test case from Spanish

• We examine Spanish verbs with clitic pronouns.
• White noise was overlaid on either the clitic or the stem.
• Participants rated the subjective loudness of the noise, on a 1–5 scale.
• Ratings differed for proclitics vs. enclitics, and for procliticized vs. encliticized stems.
• Morphological structure may act as a cognitive variable affecting perception.

Cross-linguistically, prefixes and suffixes differ in both frequency and in phonological behavior. These differences could plausibly have their source in listeners’ subjective perceptual experiences of prefixes and suffixes, an idea that we pursued using a noise-rating task in Spanish. Participants heard minimally-different Spanish words such as me patea ‘s/he kicks me’ versus patéame ‘kick me’, where the clitic pronoun me behaves phonologically like a prefix versus a suffix, and rated the loudness of white noise overlaid on either the pronoun or the verb stem. Results demonstrated that participants assigned significantly different ratings to noise occurring on prefixes versus suffixes, and on prefixed versus suffixed stems, even when the signal-to-noise ratio remained constant across conditions. That is, listeners’ subjective perceptual experience of the noise differed according to what morpheme type the noise occurred on, suggesting that morphological structure can act as a cognitive variable affecting perceptual clarity.