The Mental Lexicon - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2009

Words can be similar with respect to form (viz., spelling, pronunciation), meaning, or both form and meaning. In three lexical decision experiments (48 ms forward masked, 116 ms, and 250 ms SOAs), targets (e.g., FLOAT) followed prime words related by form only (e.g., COAT), meaning only (e.g., SWIM), or form and meaning (e.g., BOAT). BOAT–FLOAT and SWIM–FLOAT type pairs showed reduced target decision latencies relative to unrelated controls when primes were unmasked, but not when they were masked, and the magnitude of facilitation increased with increasing prime duration. By contrast, COAT–FLOAT type pairs produced significant inhibition at the shorter two prime durations. In all three experiments, including at the shortest SOA, (BOAT–FLOAT) pairs that shared form and meaning differed from COAT–FLOAT type pairs that shared only form. We discuss the similarity of the BOAT–FLOAT pattern to that of morphological facilitation and argue that if the same mechanism underlies both outcomes then activation of a shared morphemic representation need not underlie morphological facilitation.

The present study discusses psycholinguistic evidence for a difference between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology by investigating the processing of Finnish inflected and cliticized words. The data are derived from three sources of Finnish: from single-word reading performance in an agrammatic deep dyslectic speaker, as well as from visual lexical decision and wordness/learnability ratings of cliticized vs. inflected items by normal Finnish speakers. The agrammatic speaker showed awareness of the suffixes in multimorphemic words, including clitics, since he attempted to fill in this slot with morphological material. However, he never produced a clitic — either as the correct response or as an error — in any morphological configuration (simplex, derived, inflected, compound). Moreover, he produced more nominative singular errors for case-inflected nouns than he did for the cliticized words, a pattern that is expected if case-inflected forms were closely associated with their lexical heads, i.e., if they were paradigmatic and cliticized words were not. Furthermore, a visual lexical decision task with normal speakers of Finnish, showed an additional processing cost (longer latencies and more errors on cliticized than on case-inflected noun forms). Finally, a rating task indicated no difference in relative wordness between these two types of words. However, the same cliticized words were judged harder to learn as L2 items than the inflected words, most probably due to their conceptual/semantic properties, in other words due to their lack of word-level translation equivalents in SAVE languages. Taken together, the present results suggest that the distinction between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology is psychologically real.

Three experiments were conducted to determine the extent to which relational and morphosyntactic information influence the processing of modifier-noun phrases. Processing of the target was faster when the shared constituent was in the same position in both the prime and the target, regardless of whether the relation was the same or different. In contrast, relation priming was contingent on the morphosyntactic role of the shared constituent; repeating the relation with the constituent in a different morphosyntactic role did not speed processing of the target (Experiments 1–3) whereas repeating the relation with the constituent in the same role did speed processing (Experiments 3). These results suggest that conceptual information is accessed in light of the constituent’s particular morphosyntactic role.

How do speakers process phonological opacities resulting from stem allomorphy in regularly inflected word forms? We advocate a model which holds that these stem allomorphs are derived from a single, abstract lexical representation and do not require multiple access routes. Consequently, phonologically transparent and opaque forms are accessed alike. We tested our claims with four priming experiments (cross-modal and intra-modal), using German strong (irregular), weak (regular), and mixed verbs as a test case. Our hypothesis is that in spite of stem vowel alternations, strong verbs have single underspecified stems, while mixed verbs have two competing representations, reflecting both strong and weak inflectional properties. We conclude that phonological representations rather than morphological verb classes govern stem access.

Although many studies have demonstrated the effects of imageability and phonological neighborhood size, few have examined if these factors interact. Strain, Patterson, and Seidenberg (1995) explained an imageability effect in naming low-frequency exception words (only) as being due to a slowing of orthographic-to-phonological mapping for these words, which allowed semantics to have an effect. Tyler, Voice, and Moss (2000) showed an interaction between imageability and phonological cohort size in word repetition. Westbury and Buchanan (2006) found an interaction between imageability and phonology using an auditory false memory paradigm that measured the false recognition rate for phonological associates of semantically primed words. They explained the finding in terms of a greater reliance of abstract than concrete words on phonological representations. In this paper we test three related hypotheses: that the imageability x phonology interaction should be modulated by modality; that measures of phonological processing fluency should predict the size of the interaction; and that concrete and abstract words should show a systematic difference in number of phonological neighbours. We find support for all three hypotheses, suggesting that the interaction between imageability and phonology reflects a difference in the representation of abstract and concrete words in the lexicon.