Structure and Content in Word Production: Why It's Hard to Say dlorm

A standard assumption of linguistic theory is that words and sentences are properly described as a merger of structure and content. A sentence description contains both a string of words (its content) and a syntactic tree specifying the hierarchical relations among the words (its structure). An individual word, itself, is viewed as a merger of phonological structure and content. The word’s content consists of a string of phonological or phonetic features or segments and its structure describes an arrangement of these features into feet, syllables, syllabic constituents and other levels of organization (e.g., [2, 23]).