The Mental Lexicon - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2012

This paper compares the cohesiveness of English and German compounds. Cohesiveness is understood as the extent to which two given elements are integrated into a larger structural unit. The null hypothesis according to which the compounds in the two languages are equicohesive is rejected on the strength of an extended quantitative analysis. The results of ten empirical tests are consistent with the hypothesis that English compounds are less cohesive than their German counterparts. As the degree of cohesion is inversely related to the position of a given unit in the linguistic hierarchy, English compounds are argued to be more phrase-like, whereas German compounds are more word-like. German imposes more rigorous constraints on compounding than English. Thus, the prototypical categories of English and German compounds differ in terms of their formal content. Since compounds are essentially words, two somewhat disparate definitions of word prevail in the two languages. Following up on an idea put forward by Klinge (2009), the cross-linguistic difference emanates from the varying importance of inflectional morphology in the two languages. Cohesiveness is supposedly a level-specific rather than a language-wide factor.

Compound formation has been a major focus of research and debate in mental lexicon research. In particular, it has been widely observed that compounds with a regular plural non-head are dispreferred, and a long line of research has examined the nature of this constraint, including which morphological, semantic or phonological properties of the non-head underlie this dispreference. While it is typically assumed that this constraint in fact leads to the barring of a compound analysis to a noun-noun string which would otherwise violate the constraint, its implementation during sentence comprehension has not been thoroughly examined. Using self-paced reading, we demonstrate that knowledge of pluralization and compound formation is immediately utilized in the assignment of structure to noun-noun strings, and that the dispreference for regular plural non-heads in fact leads the parser away from the compound analysis in favor of a more complex grammatical alternative. These results provide new evidence for the online deployment of knowledge regarding pluralization and its interaction with compound formation, and inform our understanding of how morphological information is deployed during, and impacts real-time sentence comprehension.

Although Complement Coercion has been systematically associated with computational cost, there remains a serious confound in the experimental evidence built up in previous studies. The confound arises from the fact that lexico-semantic differences within the set of verbs assumed to involve coercion have not been taken into consideration. From among the set of verbs that have been reported to exhibit complement coercion effects we identified two clear semantic classes — aspectual verbs and psychological verbs. We hypothesize that the semantic difference between the two should result in differing processing profiles. Aspectual predicates (begin) trigger coercion and processing cost while psychological predicates (enjoy) do not. Evidence from an eye-tracking experiment supports our hypothesis. Coercion costs are restricted to aspectual predicates while no such effects are found with psychological predicates. These findings have implications for how these two kinds of predicates might be lexically encoded as well as for whether the observed interpolation of eventive meaning can be attributed to type-shifting (e.g., McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, & Jackendoff, 2001) or to pragmatic-inferential processes (e.g., De Almeida, 2004).

The present response time study investigated the influence Central Swedish word accents have on the interpretation of inflectional morphology. Effects of stem tone match/mismatch on the interpretation of Swedish present and past tense suffixes were tested. Both Accent 1 and Accent 2 were found to influence listeners’ response times related to decisions on verb tense. It thus seems that both word accents can facilitate online interpretation of words. Previous studies where tasks have not required suffix interpretation have only found an effect of Accent 1 patterns on Accent 2-associated suffixes. Accent 2 suffixes further yielded generally greater response times than Accent 1-associated suffixes. Different possible explanations for this are discussed.

Neuroimaging plays an increasingly important role in the investigation of all aspects of human cognition, including language. Historically, experimental psychology and neuroimaging relied on very different techniques, as neuroimaging studies required comparisons between different tasks rather than manipulation of conditions within a single task, as is standard in behavioural experiments. However, methodology has advanced in the past decade such that many classic behavioural paradigms can now be employed in studies that measure brain activity. We review the technical foundations of conducting studies on single-trial brain responses, using event-related fMRI and electrophysiological recordings. We focus in particular on studies of picture naming, illustrating how the same techniques that were originally used to define temporal processing stages in reaction time studies can now be applied to brain imaging studies to reveal the neural localization of those stages.