The Mental Lexicon - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2016

In alphabetic writing systems, the most consistent correspondences hold between written and spoken segments. Although English spelling uses the Roman alphabet and is thus largely phonographic, it also encodes non-phonological distinctions such as those among homophonic words (e.g., pair, pare, pear). We review evidence that English spelling is to some extent morphographic at the level of suffixes: some suffixes (e.g. -s and -ed) have a single constant spelling (‹-s› and ‹ed›), despite the fact that they vary in phonological realization (-s is realized as [z], [s], or [əz], depending on the preceding segment); while other suffixes (e.g. ‑ic) are spelled differently from homophonous word-final phonological sequences (e.g. ‹relic› vs. ‹relick›). We explore the implications of our research for psycholinguistic findings on morphological processing of written English, with a special focus on ‘affix stripping’ processes. Psycholinguistic research has largely assumed the straightforward linguistic validity of morphographic spelling, without appreciating either its typologically unusual nature or the subtle and complex relation that it bears to morphology, phonology, and semantics.

English makes use of a wide-spread pattern of word class alternation known as ‘zero-derivation.’ This involves pairs of homophonous forms which are semantically related, yet differ in part-of-speech (e.g. a knot vs. to knot). Many theories have been proposed to describe the relationship between these forms, with some proposing that to knot is covertly derived from a knot in the same way as government is from govern; an alternative view is that these pairs are instead two forms of a single lexeme with no inherent word class. We explore these claims in the context of morphological processing, using three delayed priming lexical decision tasks. The results suggest that some pairs are in a covert derivational relationship, in which the derived form is morphologically more complex than the base. However, not all such pairs are related this way, as some instead behave like inflectional relatives belonging to a single, underspecified lexical entry. Together, the experiments offer support for a mixed model, in which the grammar distinguishes between different kinds of zero-related pairs based on their underlying morphological relationships – a covert distinction to which morphological processing may be sensitive.

Current theoretical approaches to inflectional morphology make extensive use of the two concepts of abstract feature decomposition and underspecification. Psycholinguistic models of inflection, in contrast, generally lack such more differentiated morphological analyses. This paper reports a series of behavioral experiments that investigate the processing of grammatical gender of nouns in German. The results of these experiments support the idea that elements in the mental lexicon may be underspecified with regard to their grammatical features. However, contrary to all established morphological and psycholinguistic approaches, we provide evidence that even the lexical representation of bare noun stems is characterized by underspecified gender information. The observation that the domain of underspecification of grammatical features extends from inflectional markers to noun stems, supports the idea that underspecification is a more general characteristic of the mental lexicon. We conclude that this finding is mainly driven by economical reasons: a feature (or feature value) that is never used for grammatical operations (e.g., inflectional marking or evaluation of agreement) is not needed in the language system at all.

Asymmetric number attraction effects have been typically explained via a privative markedness account: plural nouns are more marked than singular ones and thus stronger attractors. However, this account does not explain results from tripartite systems, in which a third number value is available, like paucal. Here we tested whether attraction effects can be driven by specific markedness sub-components, such as frequency/naturalness of use, using Serbian, in which participles can agree with masculine subjects in singular, plural and paucal. We first conducted a naturalness judgment task, finding the following naturalness/frequency pattern: singular,plural

An extensive body of psycholinguistic research suggests that word reading involves morphological decomposition: Individual morphemes are extracted and lexically accessed when skilled readers are presented with multi-morphemic orthographic stimuli. This view is supported by the Morpheme Interference Effect (MIE): Responses to pseudowords that contain real morphemes are slower and less accurate than responses to pseudowords that contain invented morphemes. The MIE was previously demonstrated in several languages with linear morphologies. Here, we examined whether the MIE applies to Hebrew, a language with an interleaved morphology, and whether it generalizes across the nominal and verbal domains. Participants performed a lexical decision task on visually presented Hebrew words and pseudowords derived from real or invented roots. The results showed robust MIEs in both the verbal and nominal domains. Specifically, pseudowords derived from real roots induced significantly lower accuracy and longer response times compared to pseudowords derived from invented roots. Participants’ verbal and nominal MIEs were significantly correlated, suggesting that the MIE captures a general sensitivity to morphological structure.

The present study investigates to what extent morphological priming varies across different groups of native speakers of a language. In two masked-priming experiments, we investigate the processing of morphologically complex Turkish words in Turkish heritage speakers raised and living in Germany. Materials and experimental design were based on Kırkıcı and Clahsen’s (2013) study on morphological processing in Turkish native speakers and L2 learners, allowing for direct comparisons between the three groups. Experiment 1 investigated priming effects for morphologically related prime-target pairs. Heritage speakers showed a similar pattern of results as the L1 comparison group, with significant priming effects for prime-target pairs with inflected primes (e.g. ‘sorar-sor’ asks-ask) as well as for prime-target pairs with derived primes (e.g. ‘sağlık-sağ’ health-healthy). In Experiment 2, we measured priming effects for prime-target pairs which were semantically and morphologically unrelated, but only related with regard to orthographic overlap (e.g. ‘devre-dev’ period-giant). Unlike both L1 speakers raised in Turkey and highly proficient L2 learners, heritage speakers also showed significant priming effects in this condition. Our results suggest that heritage speakers differ from both native speakers and L2 learners in that they rely more on (orthographic) surface form properties of the stimulus during early stages of word recognition, at the expense of morphological decomposition.