MorphoLex-FR: A derivational morphological database for 38,840 French words

A data-driven assessment of harmony in Quebec French [e] and [ε]

This study is concerned with the aperture of the mid vowel /E/ in nonfinal syllables in Quebec French. The hypothesis tested is that in underived disyllabic words, the aperture of /E/ would be determined via harmony with the following vowel. Based on predictions from a classifier trained on acoustic properties of word-final vowels, nonfinal vowels were labeled as mid-close or mid-open. Although distant coarticulatory effects were observed, the harmony hypothesis was not supported. The results revealed a bias toward a mid-open quality and a reduced acoustic distinction, which warrant further investigation.

Malay Lexicon Project 3: The impact of orthographic-semantic consistency on lexical decision latencies

Theories of word processing propose that readers are sensitive to statistical co-occurrences between spelling and meaning. Orthographic-semantic consistency (OSC) measures provide a continuous estimate of the statistical regularities between spelling and meaning. Here we examined Malay, an Austronesian language that is agglutinative. In Malay, stems are often repeated in other words that share a related meaning (e.g., sunyi/quiet; ke-sunyi-an/silence; makan/eat; makan-an/foods). The first goal was to expand an existing large Malay database by computing OSC estimates for 2,287 monomorphemic words. The second goal was to explore the impact of root family size and OSC on lexical decision latencies for monomorphemic words. Decision latencies were collected for 1,280 Malay words of various morphological structures. Of these, data from 1,000 monomorphemic words were analysed in a series of generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs). Root family size and OSC were significant predictors of decision latencies, particularly for lower frequency words. We found a facilitative effect of root family size and OSC. Furthermore, we observed an interaction between root family size and OSC in that an effect of OSC was only apparent in words with larger root families. This interaction has not yet been explored in English but has the potential to be a new benchmark effect to test distributional models of word processing.

LaDEP: A large database of English pseudo-compounds

The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which mimic, but do not truly possess, a compound morphemic structure. These pseudo-compounds can be parsed into two free morpheme constituents (e.g., car-pet), but neither constituent functions as a morpheme within the overall word structure. The items were manually coded as pseudo-compounds, further coded for features related to their morphological structure (e.g., presence of multiple affixes, as in ruler-ship), and summarized using common psycholinguistic variables (e.g., length, frequency). This paper also presents an example analysis comparing the lexical decision response times between compound words, pseudo-compound words, and monomorphemic words. Pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words did not differ in response time, and both groups had slower response times than compound words. This analysis replicates the facilitatory effect of compound constituents during lexical processing, and demonstrates the need to emphasize the pseudo-constituent structure of pseudo-compounds to parse their effects. Further applications of LaDEP include both psycholinguistic studies investigating the nature of human word processing or production and educational or clinical settings evaluating the impact of linguistic features on language learning and impairments. Overall, the items within LaDEP provide a varied and representative sample of the population of English pseudo-compounds which may be used to facilitate further research related to morphological decomposition, lexical access, meaning construction, orthographical influences, and much more.

Morphology as an aid in orthographic learning of new words: The influence of inflected and derived forms in spelling acquisition

Prior studies have shown that children are sensitive to the principle of root consistency, whereby root morphemes retain their spelling across related words. The current study used an implicit learning situation to examine, in 56 third grade and 56 fifth grade French-speaking children, whether orthographic learning of new morphologically simple words ending in a silent letter benefited from morphological relatedness with inflected and derived forms. In the morphological condition, the new words (e.g.,clirot with a final silentt) appeared in short stories along with a morphologically related form in which the silent letter of the root was pronounced, justifying the presence of the silent letter in the root word. The morphologically complex form was an inflectional form (e.g.,clirote) for half of the children and was a derived form (e.g.,clirotage) for the other half. In the nonmorphological condition, the new words were not accompanied by morphologically related forms. After children had read the stories, their orthographic learning was assessed by asking the children to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g.,clirot,cliros, cliro). Children chose correct spellings more often in the morphological condition than in the nonmorphological condition for both types of morphology in Grade 5 but only for inflectional morphology in Grade 3. Our findings indicate that, in learning new spellings, French children seem to rely on the root consistency principle earlier for inflectional morphology than for derivational morphology. Possible reasons for this developmental delay in mastering derivational morphology are discussed.

Morphological processing in written word production is based on orthography rather than semantics

Written word production is influenced by central and peripheral processes. Evidence suggests that the activation of morphological units in the lexicon influences the dynamics of handwriting. In this study, we designed two priming experiments to examine the representation level of morphological information in the lexicon during written word production in the French language. In both experiments, target words (e.g., chanteur, "singer") were primed by a derived (e.g., chanter, "to sing"), a pseudo-derived (e.g., chantier, "work site"), or an unrelated (e.g., baleine, "whale") prime. We used the pseudo-derivation condition to disentangle two distinct levels of representation: the sublexical (also known as morpho-orthographic) and the supralexical (morpho-semantic). In Experiment 1 (learning-recall task), we measured the writing latency and writing duration of the target words. In Experiment 2 (word pair copying task), we measured the inter-word duration and writing duration of the target words. We observed morphological priming effects in both experiments: The processing of a derived prime influenced target writing compared to an unrelated prime, but the effect was observed on latencies in Experiment 1 and on target writing duration in Experiment 2. We found similar patterns of priming in the derived and pseudo-derived conditions in both experiments. The findings revealed that morphemes are processed at the morpho-orthographic representation level in written word production. Morphemes serve as grouping units during handwriting, a process that operates independently of their meaning.