Why does the pronunciation of 'electric' change to 'electricity' despite similar underlying representation?

💡 Explanation

The pronunciation changes because phonological opacity, a mechanism where later rules obscure the application of earlier rules, affects surface forms. This means that the underlying representation is not directly reflected in the output, therefore, 'electricity' differs from 'electric' rather than due to lexical access alone.

• Why does the conceptual blending of 'argument is war' lead to focusing on adversarial aspects rather than collaborative problem-solving?
• Within Mandarin Chinese, why do some instances of tone sandhi unexpectedly fail to apply at a prosodic domain boundary?
• Why does parsing fail in agglutinative languages when morphological segmentation is inaccurate?
• If a reader encounters an unexpected word during reading, which consequence follows regarding saccade targeting?
• What distinguishes coarticulation involving nasal consonants from vowel-vowel coarticulation in vocal production?
• Why does flapping (t →ɾ) in American English occur in 'butter' but not in 'tub'?