Towards a theory of multimorphemic word production: The heterogeneity of processing hypothesis

Neglected Factors Bearing on Reaction Time in Language Production

The input to phonological reasoning are alternations, that is, variations in the pronunciation of related words, such as in electri[k] - electri[s]-ity. But phonologists cannot agree what counts as a relevant alternation: the issue is highly contentious despite a research record of over 50 years. We believe that the experimental setup presented may contribute to this debate based on a kind of evidence that was not brought to bear to date. Our experiment was thus designed to distinguish between alternations where phonological computation plays no role, and those where it has contributed to language production. The design manipulates two factors that to date have not been considered in experimental studies of language production: linguistic complexity and alternation specificity. The former is understood as extra processing demands issued by two types of linguistic activity, morphosyntactic and phonological. Our results show that reaction time latencies are longer when participants are burdened with both morphosyntactic and phonological tasks than when they carry out just a morphosyntactic task, and they are still shorter in absence of both types of demands. These results allowed us to address alternation specificity, that is, the fact that different alternations (within a language or across languages) may be driven by different production routines (an idea that is consensual among linguists but underdeveloped in the psycholinguistic literature). Our study shows that four different alternations in French produce alternation-specific signatures in reaction time latencies. These findings may thus redound to the advantage of psycholinguistic studies by identifying two new factors, as well as produce results that speak to the linguistic quarrels.

Constituent frequency effects in the written production of Spanish compound words

The debate about whether compound words are accessed as whole words or via their constituents remains unresolved, especially in the field of language production. In this study, three experiments used a copying task to examine whether compound words are accessed via their constituents in handwriting production. In Experiment 1, production of compound words and noncompounds was compared. The last interletter interval within the first constituent of compounds was observed to be shorter than the same interval in noncompounds, revealing that writing durations are sensitive to morphological processing. In Experiments 2 and 3, the first and second constituent frequency was manipulated respectively. The frequency of both constituents affected writing onset times. Interestingly, the interval between the last two letters of the first constituent was shorter when the second constituent was of high frequency, suggesting that the effect obtained in this position in Experiment 1 was related to the anticipation of the second constituent. Our findings indicate that both constituents are activated before the initiation of the written response and that the second component is reactivated before the production of the first constituent has finished.

Cognitive and linguistic biases in morphology learning

Morphology is the study of the relationship between form and meaning. The study of morphology involves understanding the rules and processes that underlie word formation, including the use and productivity of affixes, and the systems that create novel word forms. The present review explores these processes by examining the cognitive components that contribute to typological regularities among morphological systems across the world's language. The review will focus on research in morpheme segmentation, the suffixing preference, acquisition of morphophonology, and acquiring morphological categories and inflectional paradigms. The review will highlight research in a range of areas of linguistics, from child language acquisition, to computational modeling, to adult language learning experiments. In order to best understand the cognitive biases that shape morphological learning, a broad, interdisciplinary approach must be taken. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Language.

A selective morpho-phonological deficit?

We report on an English-speaking, aphasic individual (TB) who showed a striking dissociation in speaking with the different forms (allomorphs) that an inflection can take. Although very accurate in producing the consonantal inflections (-/s/, -/z/, -/d/, -/t/), TB consistently omitted syllabic inflections (-/əz/, -/əd/), therefore correctly saying "dogs" or "walked," but "bench" for benches or "skate" for skated. Results from control tests ruled out that TB's selective difficulties stemmed from problems in selecting the correct inflection for the syntactic context or problems related to phonological or articulatory mechanisms. TB's selective difficulties appeared instead to concern morpho-phonological mechanisms responsible for adapting morphological elements to word phonology. These mechanisms determine whether the plural inflection surfaces in the noun bench as voiced (-/z/), unvoiced (-/s/) or syllabic (-/əz/). Our results have implications for understanding how morphological elements are encoded in the lexicon and the nature of morpho-phonological mechanisms involved in speech production.

The double identity of doubling: Evidence for the phonology-morphology split

Duality of patterning, is, by hypothesis, a universal design feature of language. Every language constructs words from meaningful units (morphemes), which, in turn, are comprised of meaningless phonological elements (e.g., segments, syllables). But whether the language faculty does, in fact, include a separate morphological level, distinct from the phonology, is a matter of controversy. To elucidate the role of morphology, here we ask whether morphological forms are constrained by putatively universal combinatorial principles, distinct from those applying to phonological patterns. Our research exploits the structural ambiguity of doubling. Doubling (e.g., trafraf) is open to two competing interpretations-as either a purely phonological form, or as a complex morphological structure that is systematically linked to meaning (e.g., trafraf is the diminutive of traf). Our experiments show that responses to doubling (trafraf) shift radically, depending on its level of analysis. Viewed as a meaningless phonological form, doubling is dispreferred irrespective of its kind (i.e., trafraf is as bad as traftaf, even though the latter violates a morphological constraint on contiguity). But once doubling is systematically linked to meaning (i.e., as a morphological structure), the doubling dislike shifts into a reliable preference, and an additional constraint on its contiguity arises (i.e., trafraf>traftaf). Remarkably, the dissociation between morphological and phonological doubling emerges regardless of whether morphological reduplication is abundant in participants' language (in Hebrew) or relatively rare (in English). These results suggest the existence of distinct linguistic constraints that preferentially target the morphological vs. phonological levels. We discuss various explanations for the origins of these restrictions.

Distinct morphological processing of recently learned compound words: An ERP study

Our vocabulary is, at least in principle, infinite. We can create new words combining existing ones in meaningful ways to form new linguistic expressions. The present study investigated the morphological processing of novel compound words in overt speech production. Native speakers of Dutch learned a series of new compounds (e.g. appelgezicht, 'apple-face') that were later used as primes in a morphological priming task. In this protocol, primes were compound words morphologically related to a target's picture name (e.g. appelgezicht was used for a picture of an apple, Dutch appel). The novel primes were compared with corresponding familiar compounds sharing a free morpheme (e.g. appelmoes, 'applesauce') and with unrelated compounds. Participants were required to read aloud words and to name pictures in a long-lag design. Behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) data were collected in two sessions, separated by 48h. Clear facilitation of picture naming latencies was obtained when pictures were paired with morphological related words. Notably, our results show that novel compounds have a stronger priming effect than familiar compounds in both sessions, which is expressed in a marked reduction in target naming latencies and a decrease in the N400 amplitude. These results suggest that participants focused more on the separate constituents when reading novel primes than in the case of existing compounds.

Inflected words in production: Evidence for a morphologically rich lexicon

Current evidence suggests that there is a difference between the representations of multimorphemic words in production and perception. In perception, it is widely believed that both whole-word and root representations exist, while in production there is little evidence for whole-word representations. The present investigation demonstrates that whole-word and root frequency independently predict the duration of words suffixed with -ing, -ed, and -s, which reveals that both root and word representations play a role in the production of inflected English words. In a second line of analysis, we find that the number of inflected phonological neighbours independently predicts the duration of monomorphemic words, which extends these results and suggests that whole-word representations exist at the lexical level. Together these results suggest that both root and word representations of inflected words are stored in the lexicon and are relevant for the production of both monomorphemic and multimorphemic words.

Differential recall of derived and inflected word forms in working memory: examining the role of morphological information in simple and complex working memory tasks

Working memory (WM) has been described as an interface between cognition and action, or a system for access to a limited amount of information needed in complex cognition. Access to morphological information is needed for comprehending and producing sentences. The present study probed WM for morphologically complex word forms in Finnish, a morphologically rich language. We studied monomorphemic (boy), inflected (boy+'s), and derived (boy+hood) words in three tasks. Simple span, immediate serial recall of words, in Experiment 1, is assumed to mainly rely on information in the focus of attention. Sentence span, a dual task combining sentence reading with recall of the last word (Experiment 2) or of a word not included in the sentence (Experiment 3) is assumed to involve establishment of a search set in long-term memory for fast activation into the focus of attention. Recall was best for monomorphemic and worst for inflected word forms with performance on derived words in between. However, there was an interaction between word type and experiment, suggesting that complex span is more sensitive to morphological complexity in derivations than simple span. This was explored in a within-subjects Experiment 4 combining all three tasks. An interaction between morphological complexity and task was replicated. Both inflected and derived forms increased load in WM. In simple span, recall of inflectional forms resulted in form errors. Complex span tasks were more sensitive to morphological load in derived words, possibly resulting from interference from morphological neighbors in the mental lexicon. The results are best understood as involving competition among inflectional forms when binding words from input into an output structure, and competition from morphological neighbors in secondary memory during cumulative retrieval-encoding cycles. Models of verbal recall need to be able to represent morphological as well as phonological and semantic information.

"hotdog", not "hot" "dog": The phonological planning of compound words

Do we say dog when we say hotdog? In five experiments using the implicit priming paradigm, we assessed whether nominal compounds composed of two free morphemes like sawdust or fishbowl are prepared for production at the segmental level in the same way that two-syllable monomorphemic words (e.g. bandit) are, or instead as sequences of separable words (e.g. full bowl or grey dust). The experiments demonstrated that nominal compounds are planned as a single sequence, not as two sequences. Specifically, the onset of the second component of the compound (e.g. /d/ in sawdust) did not act as a primeable starting point, although comparable onsets did when that component was an independent word (grey dust). We conclude that there may be a dog in hotdog at the morpheme level, but not when phonological segments are prepared for production.