The Mental Lexicon - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2018

Producing multi-word utterances is a complex, yet relatively effortless process. Research with the picture-word interference paradigm has shown that speakers can plan all elements of such utterances up to the phonological level before initiating speech, yet magnitude and direction of this phonological priming effect (i.e. facilitative vs. inhibitory) differ between but also within studies. We investigated possible sources for variability in the phonological advance planning scope. In two experiments, participants produced bare nouns (“monkey”) and complex noun phrases (“the small red monkey”) while ignoring distractor words phonologically (un)related to the noun. For low- and high-working memory capacity speakers as well as fast and slow speakers, we found phonological facilitation effects for the bare noun, but no distractor effects for the complex noun phrases. However, looking at individual distractor effects for utterance-final elements revealed a large variability between speakers. We conclude that phonological advance planning cannot be summarised as an overall effect, but should take into account inter- and intraindividual variability.

Speaking a late-learned second language (L2) is supposed to yield more variable and less consistent output than speaking one’s first language (L1), particularly with respect to reliably adhering to grammatical morphology. The current study investigates both internal processes involved in encoding morphologically complex words – by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during participants’ silent productions – and the corresponding overt output. We specifically examined compounds with plural or singular modifiers in English. Thirty-one advanced L2 speakers of English (L1: German) were compared to a control group of 20 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found an enhanced (right-frontal) negativity during (silent) morphological encoding for compounds produced from regular plural forms relative to compounds formed from irregular plurals, replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. The L2 speakers’ overt productions, however, were significantly less consistent than those of the L1 speakers on the same task. We suggest that L2 speakers employ the same mechanisms for morphological encoding as L1 speakers, but with less reliance on grammatical constraints than L1 speakers.

This study explores the retrieval of proper names and the sensitivity of this lexical category to the modulatory effect of cognitive reserve in an aging population. Thirty-two elderly patients, undergoing their first neuropsychological evaluation were matched for age and education to thirty-two healthy controls. All participants were administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to measure their global cognitive performance, the Famous Face Naming test to assess proper name retrieval, and the Cognitive Reserve Index (CRI) questionnaire to obtain an index of cognitive reserve. The two groups had comparable CRI total scores, but patients’ performance was worse in both MoCA and Famous Face naming test, compared to healthy controls. Results showed that cognitive reserve predicted global cognitive performance (i.e., MoCA score) in the patients, but not in the healthy participants. Naming proper names was independent from cognitive reserve. This might be due to their lexical nature, which lies in a poor semantic connection between proper names and their bearers.

This methodological study provides a step-by-step introduction to a computational implementation of word and paradigm morphology using linear mappings between vector spaces for form and meaning. Taking as starting point the linear regression model, the main concepts underlying linear mappings are introduced and illustrated with R code. It is then shown how vector spaces can be set up for Latin verb conjugations, using 672 inflected variants of two verbs each from the four main conjugation classes. It turns out that mappings from form to meaning (comprehension), and from meaning to form (production) can be carried out loss-free. This study concludes with a demonstration that when the graph of triphones, the units that underlie the form space, is mapped onto a 2-dimensional space with a self-organising algorithm from physics (graphopt), morphological functions show topological clustering, even though morphemic units do not play any role whatsoever in the model. It follows, first, that evidence for morphemes emerging from experimental studies using, for instance, fMRI, to localize morphemes in the brain, does not guarantee the existence of morphemes in the brain, and second, that potential topological organization of morphological form in the cortex may depend to a high degree on the morphological system of a language.

Most dictionary definitions for the term compound word characterize it as a word that itself contains two or more words. Thus, a compound word such as goldfish is composed of the constituent words gold and fish. In this report, we present evidence that compound words such as goldfish might not contain the words gold and fish, but rather positionally bound compound constituents (e.g., gold- and -fish) that are distinct and often in competition with their whole word counterparts. This conceptualization has significant methodological consequences: it calls into question the assumption that, in a traditional visual constituent priming paradigm, the participant can be said to be presented with constituents as primes. We claim that they are not presented with constituents. Rather, they are presented with competing free-standing words. We present evidence for the processing of Hebrew compound words that supports this perspective by revealing that, counter-intuitively, prime constituent frequency has an attenuating effect on constituent priming. We relate our findings to previous findings in the study of German compound processing to show that the effect that we report is fundamentally morphological rather than positional or visual in nature. In contrast to German in which compounds are always head-final morphologically, Hebrew compounds are always head initial. In addition, whereas German compounds are written as single words, Hebrew compounds are always written with spaces between constituents. Thus, the commonality of patterning across German and Hebrew is independent of visual form and constituent ordering, revealing, as we claim, core features of the constituent priming paradigm and compound processing.