- Home
- e-Journals
- The Mental Lexicon
- Previous Issues
- Volume 11, Issue, 2016
The Mental Lexicon - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2016
-
The dual role of homophone dominance. Why homophone intrusions on regular verb forms so often go unnoticed
Author(s): Nina Verhaert, Ellen Danckaert and Dominiek Sandrapp.: 1–25 (25)More LessWe investigated whether the effect of Homophone Dominance that has been reported for spelling errors on Dutch verb homophones (Sandra, Frisson, & Daems, 1999) also occurs in perception. This effect was indeed observed: participants in a proofreading experiment overlooked more homophone intrusions when the intruder was more dominant than the target form, irrespective of the inflectional ending. Participant groups whose grammatical awareness was better developed made fewer errors but also showed the effect of Homophone Dominance. The findings are explained in terms of a Computational and Similarity-Based Race model, in which a conscious and slow computational process in working memory, implementing the spelling rule, competes with an automatic and fast, frequency-sensitive process of lexical access. The presence of the effect in both spelling and reading explains why these errors on descriptively simple verb forms in Dutch are so persistent.
-
Accessing Morphosyntax in L1 and L2 Word Recognition
Author(s): Sina Bosch and Harald Clahsenpp.: 26–54 (29)More LessIn fusional languages, inflectional affixes may encode multiple morphosyntactic features such as case, number, and gender. To determine how these features are accessed during both native (L1) and non-native (L2) word recognition, the present study compares the results from a masked visual priming experiment testing inflected adjectives of German to those of a previous overt (cross-modal) priming experiment on the same phenomenon. While for the L1 group both experiments produced converging results, a group of highly-proficient Russian L2 learners of German showed native-like modulations of repetition priming effects under overt, but not under masked priming conditions. These results indicate that not only affixes but also their morphosyntactic features are accessible during initial form-based lexical access, albeit only for L1 and not for L2 processing. We argue that this contrast is in line with other findings suggesting that non-native language processing is less influenced by structural information than the L1.
-
Implicit acquisition of tone-suffix connections in L2 learners of Swedish
Author(s): Andrea Schremm, Pelle Söderström, Merle Horne and Mikael Rollpp.: 55–75 (21)More LessSwedish native speakers (NSs) unconsciously use tones realized on word stems to predict upcoming suffixes during speech comprehension. The present response time study investigated whether relatively proficient second language (L2) learners of Swedish have acquired the underlying association between tones and suffixes without explicit instruction, internalizing a feature that is specific to their L2. Learners listened to sentences in which the tone on the verb stem either validly or invalidly cued the following present or past tense inflection. Invalidly cued suffixes led to increased decision latencies in a verb tense identification task, suggesting that learners pre-activated suffixes associated with stem tones in a manner similar to NSs. Thus, L2 learners seemed to have acquired the tone-suffix connections through implicit mechanisms. Correctly cued suffixes were associated with a smaller processing advantage in the L2 group relative to NSs performing the same task; nevertheless, results suggest a tendency for increasingly native-like tone processing with cumulative language experience. The way suffix type affected response times also indicates exposure-related effects.
-
Transitivity in similarity judgments on German verbs
Author(s): Michael Richter and Roeland van Houtpp.: 76–93 (18)More LessThis paper investigates set-theoretical transitive and intransitive similarity relationships in triplets of verbs that can be deduced from raters’ similarity judgments on the pairs of verbs involved. We collected similarity judgments on pairs made up of 35 German verbs and found that the concept of transitivity adds to the information obtained from collecting pair-wise semantic similarity judgments. The concept of transitive similarity enables more complex relations to be revealed in triplets of verbs. To evaluate the outcomes that we obtained by analyzing transitive similarities we used two previously developed verb classifications of the same set of 35 verbs based on the analysis of large corpora (Richter & van Hout, 2016). We applied a modified form of weak stochastic transitivity (Block & Marschak, 1960; Luce & Suppes, 1965; Tversky, 1969) and found that (1), in contrast to Rips’ claim (2011), similarity relations in raters’ judgments systematically turn out to be transitive, and (2) transitivity discloses lexical and aspectual properties of verbs relevant in distinguishing verb classes.
-
Deverbal compound comprehension in preschool children
Author(s): Poliana Goncalves Barbosa and Elena Nicoladispp.: 94–114 (21)More LessWhen English-speaking children first attempt to produce deverbal compound words (like muffin maker), they often misorder the noun and the verb (e.g., make-muffin, maker muffin, or making-muffin). The purpose of the present studies was to test Usage-based and Distributional Morphology-based explanations of children’s errors. In Study 1, we compared three to four-year old children’s interpretations of Verb-Noun (e.g., push-ball) to Verb-erNoun (e.g., pusher-ball). In Study 2, we compared three- to five-year old children’s interpretations of Verb-erNoun (e.g., pusher-ball) to Noun-Verb-er (e.g., ball pusher). Results from both studies suggest that while preschool children’s understanding of deverbal compounds is still developing, they already show some sensitivity to word ordering within compounds. We argue that these results are interpretable within Usage-based approaches.
-
What the Networks Tell us about Serial and Parallel Processing
Author(s): Antoine Tremblay, Elissa Asp, Anne Johnson, Malgorzata Zarzycka Migdal, Tim Bardouille and Aaron J. Newmanpp.: 115–160 (46)More LessA large literature documenting facilitative effects for high frequency complex words and phrases has led to proposals that high frequency phrases may be stored in memory rather than constructed on-line from their component parts (similarly to high frequency complex words). To investigate this, we explored language processing during a novel picture description task. Using the magneto-encephalographam (MEG) technique and generalised additive mixed-effects modelling, we characterised the effects of the frequency of use of single words as well as two-, three-, and four-word sequences (N-grams) on brain activity during the pre-production stage of unconstrained overt picture description. We expected amplitude responses to be modulated by N-gram frequency such that if N-grams were stored we would see a corresponding reduction or flattening in amplitudes as frequency increased. We found that while amplitude responses to increasing N-gram frequencies corresponded with our expectations about facilitation, the effect appeared at low frequency ranges and for single words only in the phonological network. We additionally found that high frequency N-grams elicited activity increases in some networks, which may be signs of competition or combination depending on the network. Moreover, this effect was not reliable for single word frequencies. These amplitude responses do not clearly support storage for high frequency multi-word sequences. To probe these unexpected results, we turned our attention to network topographies and the timing. We found that, with the exception of an initial ‘sentence’ network, all the networks aggregated peaks from more than one domain (e.g. semantics and phonology). Moreover, although activity moved serially from anterior ventral networks to dorsal posterior networks during processing, as expected in combinatorial accounts, sentence processing and semantic networks ran largely in parallel. Thus, network topographies and timing may account for (some) facilitative effects associated with frequency. We review literature relevant to the network topographies and timing and briefly discuss our results in relation to current processing and theoretical models.
Volumes & issues
Most Read This Month
