Morphological Decomposition in Japanese De-adjectival Nominals: Masked and Overt Priming Evidence

Abstract

Whether morpheme-based processing extends to relatively unproductive derived words remains a matter of debate. Although whole-word storage and access has been proposed for some derived words, such as Japanese de-adjectival nominals with the unproductive (-mi) suffix (e.g., Hagiwara et al. in Language 75:739-763, 1999), Clahsen and Ikemoto (Ment Lex 7:147-182, 2012) found masked priming from de-adjectival nominals with productive (-sa) and unproductive (-mi) suffixes to their adjectivally-inflected base morpheme. Using masked and unmasked priming, we examine whether adjectivally-inflected base morpheme primes facilitate the processing of Japanese de-adjectival nominal targets with a productive or unproductive affix, including an orthographic-overlap condition and semantic relatedness measure that Clahsen and Ikemoto (2012) did not include. Our results replicate and extend Clahsen and Ikemoto (2012), revealing significant, statistically-equivalent morphological priming effects for -sa and -mi affixed targets, independent of orthographic and semantic relatednesss, suggesting that the processing of derived words with the unproductive -mi affix makes recourse to morpheme-level representations.

Morphological decomposition in Bantu: a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation

“…Similarly, a number of masked priming studies have investigated morphological phenomena in other Indo-European languages such as German (derivation: Mousikou & Schroeder, 2019;inflection: Neubauer & Clahsen, 2009), Dutch (Diependaele, Sandra, & Grainger, 2009), French (derivation: Giraudo & Grainger, 2000;inflection: Meunier & Marslen-Wilson, 2004), Spanish (Domínguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 2000;Domínguez, Segui, & Cuetos, 2002), and Russian (Kazanina, Dukova-Zheleva, Geber, Kharlamov, & Tonciulescu, 2008). Lastly, there are also some masked priming studies investigating morphological decomposition in non-Indo-European languages, such as Basque (Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, & Carreiras, 2009), Japanese (Clahsen & Ikemoto, 2012;Fiorentino, Naito-Billen, & Minai, 2016), Korean (Kim, Wang, & Taft, 2015), and Turkish (Kirkici & Clahsen, 2013).…”

The Generalization of Inflectional and Derivational Patterns to Novel Stems by L1 Turkish Learners of L2 English

“…Making use of masked or overt priming paradigms, Clahsen and Ikemoto (2012), Fiorentino, Naito-Billen, and Minai (2016), and Silva and Clahsen (2008) have shown that the effect of productivity might not be a good predictor of decomposability for derivational affixes. It should be noted, however, that the above studies focused on the very early processing of morphologically complex word forms and that their results should not be taken as directly relevant to the findings of the present study and other studies that have relied on off-line measures.…”

How Orthography Modulates Morphological Priming: Subliminal Kanji Activation in Japanese

“…Japanese). In previous research, priming effects under masked stimulus conditions have been reported for morphologically complex words in Japanese (Clahsen and Ikemoto, 2012 ; Fiorentino et al, 2015 ), specifically for deadjectival forms with the suffixes – sa and – mi . In both studies, significant masked priming effects were found irrespective of whether primes and targets were spelled in the common mixed script (i.e., with kanji plus kana) or in kana only.…”

“…Consequently it is conceivable that the reported priming effects are due to this overlap in kanji, rather than (or perhaps on top of) affix stripping. Consider, for example, the prime-target pair 楽しい - 楽しみ “delightful-delightfulness” from Fiorentino et al ( 2015 , Table 1 ) from which the orthographic overlap in terms of shared kanji is obvious. Clahsen and Ikemoto ( 2012 ) tried to reduce this kind of direct orthographic overlap between primes and targets by presenting their stimuli in the kana-only script, with the primes and the targets in hiragana.…”

“…This then raises the question of whether affix stripping under masked priming conditions universally applies in morphological parsing, irrespective of a language's particular writing system. This question is still open as there are only very few studies to date that have examined masked morphological priming in languages with non-alphabetic writing systems (but see Clahsen and Ikemoto, 2012 ; Fiorentino et al, 2015 ). Against this background, the present study reports results from masked priming experiments in Japanese, a language in which morphological segmentation and orthographic boundaries sometimes fail to coincide.…”