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- Volume 4, Issue, 2009
The Mental Lexicon - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2009
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2009
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Masked morphological priming of compound constituents
Author(s): Robert Fiorentino and Ella Fund-Reznicekpp.: 159–193 (35)More LessRecent masked priming studies suggest that complex words are rapidly segmented into potential morphological constituents during initial visual word recognition. Much of this evidence involves affixation or other formally regular operations, leaving open the question of whether these effects rely heavily on the identification of a closed-class affix or other formal regularity. In two masked priming experiments with English transparent and opaque bimorphemic compound primes consisting solely of open-class morphemes, we find significant constituent priming, but no significant priming for purely orthographic overlap. We conclude that masked morphological priming generalizes across word-formation types to include compounds with no affix or other regular form. These results provide new evidence for across-the-board morphological-level segmentation during visual word recognition and for morpheme-based compound processing.
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Phonemic representations in morphological segmentation of written English words
Author(s): Cintia S. Widmann and Robin K. Morrispp.: 194–211 (18)More LessWe addressed the issue of the kinds of representations involved in morphological segmentation during visual word recognition. Specifically, we asked whether morphological segmentation operates on phonemic representations. The results of two masked priming experiments indicated that words with appearance of morphological complex structure (ponder) primed their apparent embedded roots (POND) as much as actual morphologically complex words (dreamer) primed their actual embedded roots (DREAM). However, the effect was significantly reduced in naming and it became inhibitory in lexical decision for primes (caper) whose phonemic representations did not completely overlap with those of their potential roots (CAP) but whose orthographic representations did. This suggests that morphological segmentation is not restricted to orthographic representations, but that it also engages phonemic representations.
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Inflection in Williams Syndrome: The Perfective Past Tense in Greek
Author(s): Stavroula Stavrakaki and Harald Clahsenpp.: 215–238 (24)More LessThis study presents experimental results from elicited production and judgment tasks examining perfective past-tense forms of Greek in seven individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) in comparison to three age groups of typically-developing children. We found that the WS group relied more on the regular (‘sigmatic’) past tense and less on the irregular (‘non-sigmatic’) one than typically-developing children. While for the sigmatic past tense, individuals with WS achieved the same or even higher scores as the controls, they had lower scores on several measures involving non-sigmatic forms and produced more overgeneralizations of sigmatic forms than the controls. We also found developmental changes in the performance of the WS group that were largely parallel to those seen for unimpaired children. Our conclusion is that apart from difficulties accessing irregular word forms in production, the inflectional system of people with WS is unimpaired.
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Frequency and analogical effects in the spelling of full-form and sublexical homophonous patterns by 12 year-old children
Author(s): Dominiek Sandra and Lien Van Abbenyenpp.: 239–275 (37)More LessTwo experiments in which 12-year old children had to spell Dutch inflected verb forms are reported. Both experiments focus on homophone dominance, i.e., the fact that spellers tend to make more intrusion errors on the lower-frequency form than on the higher-frequency one. Homophone-induced errors are studied at the level of full forms in Experiment 1 and at the sublexical level in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1 the children had to fill out two types of verb forms with homophones in their 1st (verb-final d) and 3rd person (verb-final dt) singular present tense. In both types the two verb forms had a very low frequency but the 1st person homophone of one type had the same spelling as a noun or adjective ending in d, or ended in such a word. The children made significantly more d intrusions on the 3rd person of these verbs than on the 3rd person of control verbs. In Experiment 2 three types of past tenses with stem-final d and suffix de had to be filled out, differing in the type of orthographic cluster preceding the stem-d. The pattern of results supports an account in which phonologically similar verbs are activated by the sublexical word-final sound sequence, which gives rise to intrusion errors when that sequence is homophonous between past tenses ending in de and dde. As the same phenomenon manifests itself at the levels of full forms and sublexical patterns, a model that automatically captures systematic correspondences between phonological and orthographic representations can best explain these findings. Connectionist and exemplar accounts are the prime candidates for such an explanation. Words-and-rules models, on the other hand, have several problems explaining the data.
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Why are Noun-Verb-er compounds so difficult for English-speaking children?
Author(s): Jaya Nagpal and Elena Nicoladispp.: 276–301 (26)More LessPreschool children who attempt novel NV-er compounds (like cat brusher) often misorder the noun and the verb, arguably based on sentential phrasal ordering (e.g., Clark, Hecht, & Mulford, 1986). In this study, we test this argument by replicating Clark’s prediction that children’s attempts will fall into predictable stages based on age and by comparing children’s production of NV-er compounds with another construction that violates sentential phrasal ordering: Verb-ingNoun phrases. Our studies show that we could not replicate the stages described by Clark and that children were more likely to produce Verb-ingNoun constructions in the target order than NV-er. However, the children’s constructions showed a contingency between the order of the elements and the children’s choice of morpheme, suggesting that they were often aiming for the target form. These results suggest that children do not misorder nouns and verbs in NV-er compounds because of phrasal ordering. We discuss possible alternatives for why NV-er compounds are difficult for preschool children.
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