How Simple Complex Words Can Be: Morphological Processing and Word Representations

Abstract

In four lexical decision experiments we studied the effect of morphological complexity on word recognition. Some potentially relevant linguistic aspects of derived nouns were varied: the location of the affix (prefix vs. suffix); the genuineness of the affix (real vs. pseudo); the orthographic legality of pseudo-stems; semantic compositionality; the nature of the stem (free vs. bound); the origin of the complex word (Latinate vs. Germanic); the currency of the stem (current vs. moribund). Furthermore, in the first two experiments, we systematically varied the proportion of complex and simple words to see whether strategies influence morphological effects on recognition times. Consistent with Taft's notion of affix stripping, pseudoprefixed words show longer mean decision times and higher error rates than truly prefixed words. Further, the prefixed and nonprefixed (but not pseudoprefixed) words are processed equally rapidly, indicating that a decompositional process is efficient. No differences were found, however, for suffixed, pseudosuffixed, and nonsuffixed words. There was no effect of the proportion of simple and complex words. There are some indications that the etymological origin of words may affect recognition times, but no other linguistic aspects of derivations do so. The results of the four experiments are interpreted as supporting a left-to-right process for word recognition in which morphemes are extracted automatically. During this process information encoded by morphological structure becomes available for other processes.

Lexical Access Routes to Nouns in a Morphologically Rich Language

“…Considering the evidence for left-to-right processing in visual word recognition (e.g., Bergman, Hudson & Eling, 1988;Taft, 1994) and the importance of the stem in lexical access (Taft, 1988), a word-initial pseudostem might affect word recognition even though pseudosuffixation failed to do so. Indeed, Taft (1979) reported a recognition delay for such forms in English.…”

Auditory Processing of Polymorphemic Pseudowords

“…The decompositional route of the model is sensitive to variations in semantic transparency, the likelihood that a given string is a prefix, and morpheme frequencies (see below). Other variations on the dual-route theme have also been proposed (e.g., Anshen & Aronoff, 1981;Bergman, Hudson, & Eling, 1988;Caramazza, Laudanna, & Romani, 1988;Frauenfelder & Schreuder, 1992;Laudanna, Burani, & Cermele, 1994;Laudanna & Burani, 1995;Laudanna, Cermele, & Caramazza, 1997;Schreuder & Baayen, 1995;Stanners, Neiser, & Painton, 1979).…”

“…Dual-route models have often provided the context for the initial exploration of previously ignored variables, such as semantic transparency (Bergman et al, 1988;Henderson, 1985;Smith, 1988;Smith & Sterling, 1982). Words such as unhappy are highly transparent, while those such as relate are opaque.…”

Morphology and meaning in the English mental lexicon.

“…Current psycholinguistic research has looked not only at English but also at languages with morphological systems as disparate as Italian (e.g., Laudanna, Badecker, & Caramazza, 1989), Dutch (e.g., Bergman, Hudson, & Eling, 1988;Schriefers, Zwitserlood, & Roelofs, 1991), Serbo-Croatian(e.g.,Lukatelaetal., 1980), and Chinese (Zhou, 1992;Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1991). It is important to study morphology cross-linguistically, but results from one language cannot be directly interpreted as evidence about the organization of the lexicon in another language.…”