The Mental Lexicon - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2018

We report on a visual masked priming experiment designed to explore the role of morphology in Maltese visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, subjects were faster to judge Maltese words of Semitic origin that were primed by triconsonantal letter-strings corresponding to their root-morphemes. In contrast, they were no faster to judge Maltese words of non-Semitic origin that were primed by an equivalent, but non-morphemic, set of three consonant letters, suggesting that morphological overlap, rather than simple form overlap, drives this facilitatory effect. Maltese is unique among the Semitic languages for its orthography: Maltese alone uses the Latin alphabet and requires that all vowels are written, making such triconsonantal strings illegal non-words to which Maltese readers are never exposed, as opposed to other Semitic languages such as Hebrew in which triconsonantal strings often correspond to real words. Under a decomposition-based account of morphological processing, we interpret these results as suggesting that across reading experience Maltese readers have abstracted out and stored root-morphemes for Semitic-origin words lexically, such that these morphemic representations can be activated by exposure to root-letters in isolation and thus prime morphological derivatives.

Previous studies have shown that nonnative phonemic contrasts pose perceptual difficulties for L2 learners, but less is known about how these contrasts affect speech production in L2 learners. In the present study, we elicited speech errors in a tongue twister task investigating L1 Arabic speakers producing L2 English words. Two sets of word productions were contrasted: words with phonemic contrasts existing in both L1 Arabic and L2 English (e.g. tip vs dip, sing vs zing) or words with phonemic contrasts existing in English alone (pit vs bit, fat vs vat). Results showed that phonemic contrasts that do not exist in Arabic induced significantly more speech errors in L2 Arabic speakers of English compared to native English speakers than did phonemic contrasts found in both languages. Implications of these findings for representations in L2 learners are discussed.

Pronunciation variation in many ways is systematic, yielding patterns that a canny listener can exploit in order to aid perception. This work asks whether listeners actually do draw upon these patterns during speech perception. We focus in particular on a phenomenon known as paradigmatic enhancement, in which suffixes are phonetically enhanced in verbs which are frequent in their inflectional paradigms. In a set of four experiments, we found that listeners do not seem to attend to paradigmatic enhancement patterns. They do, however, attend to the distributional properties of a verb’s inflectional paradigm when the experimental task encourages attention to sublexical detail, as is the case with phoneme monitoring (Experiment 1a–b). When tasks require more holistic lexical processing, as with lexical decision (Experiment 2), the effect of paradigmatic probability disappears. If stimuli are presented in full sentences, such that the surrounding context provides richer contextual and semantic information (Experiment 3), even otherwise robust influences like lexical frequency disappear. We propose that these findings are consistent with a perceptual system that is flexible, and devotes processing resources to exploiting only those patterns that provide a sufficient cognitive return on investment.

In two experiments, we explored the integration of newly learned L2 German lexical units with differing semantic properties into the L2 semantic network. Previous studies ( Dagenbach et al., 1990 for L1; Bordag et al., 2016 for L2) have indicated that the access to emergent representations with weak memory traces is supported by a retrieval mechanism that inhibits their semantically related competitors with lower activation thresholds and higher selection potential. In this study used pseudowords as novel L2 items and employed semantic priming and semantic categorization tasks as well as an introspective post-test to explore whether the access to new L2 words is modulated by meaning novelty (Experiment 1) and elaborateness (Experiment 2).

Previous studies have identified that conceptual categories corresponding to nouns exhibit semantic domain effects: (1) classification into biological ones reflects a non-additive consideration of their defining dimensions whereas classification into artefactual and, presumably, social nouns is based on an additive one (2) nominal biological concepts are less graded than artifacts. Nevertheless, much uncertainty exists about the structure of conceptual categories corresponding to multidimensional adjectives. We propose that the effects observed for concepts corresponding to nouns are connected to a property we term discrete dimension accessibility and ask how it is manifested in multidimensional concepts corresponding to adjectives. We then hypothesize that (a) ratings of dimension-counting structures can be used as a diagnostic for these properties (b) the dimensions of multidimensional concepts corresponding to adjectives are inherently discrete. We report an acceptability rating experiment involving 42 adult Hebrew speakers revealing that with nouns, dimension-counting constructions with artefactual and social predicates are rated higher than ones with biological predicates, hence confirming (a). With adjectives, ratings for dimension-counting constructions remained high across the domain manipulation, hence confirming (b). We argue that the interaction between discrete dimension accessibility and lexical category indicates that lexical distinctions interact with conceptual ones.

This article proposes a measure of the competitive strength of two rival patterns in the domain of a subgroup of irregular verbs in English. There is competition between simple pasts built on the vowels /æ/ and /ʌ/, and the same competition is found in the domain of past participles. As a result of such competition, the past tense stang (from sting) was replaced with stung. The /ʌ/ forms are more competitive than the /æ/ forms ( Bybee & Slobin 2007 , Bybee & Moder 2007 ). To understand this, we counted the number of types for /æ/ (such as sang, rang) and /ʌ/ (such as stung, stuck) in the irregular simple past and did the same in the irregular participle (such as sat, had and sung, done). We calculated a measure of competitiveness for these two patterns incorporating type frequency and token frequency. This measure was used to explain why /ʌ/ forms are more competitive than /æ/ forms.