The Mental Lexicon - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2008

The avoidance of regular but not irregular plurals inside compounds (e.g., *rats eater vs. mice eater) has been one of the most widely studied morphological phenomena in the psycholinguistics literature. To examine whether the constraints that are responsible for this contrast have any general significance beyond compounding, we investigated derived word forms containing regular and irregular plurals in two experiments. Experiment 1 was an offline acceptability judgment task, and Experiment 2 measured eye movements during reading derived words containing regular and irregular plurals and uninflected base nouns. The results from both experiments show that the constraint against regular plurals inside compounds generalizes to derived words. We argue that this constraint cannot be reduced to phonological properties, but is instead morphological in nature. The eye-movement data provide detailed information on the time-course of processing derived word forms indicating that early stages of processing are affected by a general constraint that disallows inflected words from feeding derivational processes, and that the more specific constraint against regular plurals comes in at a subsequent later stage of processing. We argue that these results are consistent with stage-based models of language processing.

Why do compounds containing regular plurals, such as rats-infested, sound so much worse than corresponding compounds containing irregular plurals, such as mice-infested? Berent and Pinker (2007) reported five experiments showing that this theoretically important effect hinges on the morphological structure of the plurals, not their phonological properties, as had been claimed by Haskell, MacDonald, and Seidenberg (2003). In this note we reply to a critique by these authors. We show that the connectionist model they invoke to explain the data has nothing to do with compounding but exploits fortuitous properties of adjectives, and that our experimental results disconfirm explicit predictions the authors had made. We also present new analyses which answer the authors’ methodological objections. We conclude that the interaction of compounding with regularity is a robust effect, unconfounded with phonology or semantics.

This paper provides experimental evidence to support the existence of mental correlates of lexical clusters. Data were collected by means of a sorting task and a gap filling task designed to study the cognitive reality of clusters of near synonyms as well as of the properties that have high predictive power for subcategorizing near synonyms. The results for nine near-synonymous verbs expressing ‘try’ in Russian confirm the linguistic account of the synonym structure that was proposed on the basis of corpus data in Divjak and Gries (2006). We conclude that speakers learn and retain exemplars from which they extract distributional patterns that help shape the arrangement of verbs in lexical space. Consequently, a corpus-based behavioral profile approach to lexical semantics is strengthened as it provides a firm basis for cognitively realistic language descriptions.

Recent research on language production suggests that bilinguals shift from using inhibitory control mechanisms to a language-specific selective mechanism during development (Costa, Santesteban, & Ivanova, 2006). Costa et al. argue that the robustness of the L2 lexical representations may be critical to the functionality of a language-specific selective mechanism. Accordingly, in the present study we measured the lexical robustness of a group of 54 English dominant learners of Spanish using a verbal fluency task and investigated its effect on their performance in a picture-naming task with language switches. The results suggest that L2 lexical robustness predicts the shift to a language-specific selective mechanism during speech production. Moreover, we demonstrate a specific threshold of lexical robustness necessary to engage the mechanism.

In the present study we use a cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming paradigm to examine the influence on word recognition of phonological/orthographic variation between morphologically related nouns. We exploit particular characteristics of a highly inflected language, Polish, in which consonantal stem-boundary (portre/tɕ/e-portre/t/ ‘portrait’) and vocalic stem-internal (obr/ɔ/tem-obr/u/t ‘turn’) alternations occur. The impact of morphological relatedness was measured against an orthographic and an unrelated baseline condition. Invariant magnitudes of morphological facilitation arose across the two baseline conditions. More importantly, non-alternating as well as alternating morphological relatives showed robust facilitation. When comparing items featuring predictable stem-boundary change only and those featuring the stem-boundary and vocalic stem-internal changes, effects of morphological relatedness did not interact with degree of phonological/orthographic variation. We argue that morphological facilitation survives accross styles of alternation that vary from language to language.

This paper investigates the existence of systematicity between two similarity-based representations of the lexicon, one focusing on word-form and another one based on cooccurrence statistics in speech, which captures aspects of syntax and semantics. An analysis of the three most frequent form-homogeneous word groups in a Spanish speech corpus (cvcv, cvccv and cvcvcv words) supports the existence of systematicity: words that sound similar tend to occur in the same lexical contexts in speech. A lexicon that is highly systematic in this respect, however, may lead to confusion between similar-sounding words that appear in similar contexts. Exploring the impact of different phonological features on systematicity reveals that while some features (such as sharing consonants or the stress pattern) seem to underlie the measured systematicity, others (particularly, sharing the stressed vowel) oppose it, perhaps to help discriminate between words that systematicity may render ambiguous.