Native and non-native processing of morphologically complex words in Italian

The present work focuses on the organization of the mental lexicon in native and non-native speakers and aims at investigating whether words are connected in the mind in terms of morphological criteria, i.e., through a network of associations establishing when a co-occurrence of form and meaning is found. Psycholinguistic research on native lexical access has demonstrated that morphology indeed underlies the organization of the mental lexicon, even though controversies about the locus of this level of organization remain. On the other hand, research in the field of second language acquisition has only recently turned to investigate such issues and its findings so far have been controversial. Specifically, the debate centers on whether native and non-native speakers share the same processing systems. According to recent proposals (Heyer & Clahsen 2015), this would not be the case and L2 processing would be more affected by formal rather than morphological criteria. In this light, the present work is aimed at verifying the impact of formal characteristics in native and non-native lexical access focusing on the processing of formally transparent versus non-transparent words in Italian. Two morphological phenomena are investigated by means of four psycholinguistic experiments involving a lexical decision task combined with the masked priming paradigm. Experiments 1 & 2 compare the processing of allomorphic vs non-allomorphic derivatives, to investigate whether formal alterations impair the appreciation of the relationship between two morphologically related words. Experiments 3 & 4 are focused on lack of base autonomy found in so-called bound stems, i.e., stems which cannot occur in isolation and are aimed at determining whether the processing of free and bound stems differs. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that allomorphic variation does not influence the associations established among related words in native speakers, in line with the predictions that can be formulated within usage-based perspectives on language. Non-native speakers, on the other hand, seem to be more pervasively affected by the phonological/orthographical properties of words, but not to the point that transparent morphological relations can be reduced to mere form overlap shared by morphological relatives. Likewise, stem autonomy was not found to affect the way words containing bound and free stems are processed by native speakers, at least under certain conditions, suggesting that boundedness is not an issue influencing the establishment of morphological relationships among words. Non-native speakers, however, were found to be sensitive to the isolability of the stem, in a way that suggests that free bases may be more salient morphological units for them, as opposed to bound stems, which are seemingly more closely associated with orthographic strings resembling each other. Taken together, the findings of the present work suggest a model of the native mental lexicon based on words and morphological schemas emerging from the relationships establishing among them, despite phonological variations and stem boundedness. While it is unclear whether such a system of connections and schemas is equally strong in the non-native lexicon, morphological relationships still appear to drive lexical organization. Crucially, however, such organization is modulated by form, as demonstrated by the effects of phonological variations and lack of base autonomy

On the interplay between family and series effects in morphological masked priming

The aim of our research is to further investigate the role of suffixes in morphological processing and to verify whether morphological series (i.e., paradigms of complex words sharing the same suffix) play a role in lexical representation and processing, as suggested by paradigm-based approaches (Bybee 1988; Booij 2010). The premise of our study is that, while the relationship between words belonging to the same morphological family has been extensively confirmed by psycholinguistic research, experimental studies on the relationship between words belonging to the same morphological series have been scarce so far and produced inconsistent results. On such premises, we carried a series of masked priming experiments on Italian, which consider truly suffixed words with respect to words with non-morphological endings (it. inquina-mento \u2018pollution\u2019 - cemento \u2018cement\u2019) and we focused on series which display different degrees of internal consistency. Crucially, in order to facilitate the emergence of the series effect, we used a semantic categorization task associated with the masked priming technique, instead of the traditional lexical decision (LDT). Our results show that when the masked priming effects are not inhibited by formal factors (as happens with LDT), the facilitation induced by the words organization in series emerges more easily, although it is affected by series consistency in different ways. Firstly, while the series effect approaches significance for consistent series, it fails to emerge for non-consistent ones (Exp.1). Secondly, the base effect is more robust and clear-cut in consistent than in non-consistent series. Thirdly, in more consistent series the interference of formal/orthographic factors is absent or reduced, while it significantly affects processing in less consistent series (Exp. 2). All in all, our results demonstrate that the paradigmatic effects are inherently graded as they crucially depend on series internal consistency and that they crucially interact with family effects during word access

Word knowledge and word usage - Representations and processes in the mental lexicon

The final NetWordS Conference, held on the 30th and 31st of March, and 1st of April 2015 in Pisa, was convened by Prof. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Dr. Vito Pirrelli and Dr. Claudia Marzi, and brought together 91 participants (scholars, Post-Docs, PhD students) from numerous European, and some non-European, countries. A 3-day schedule involved all participants in a focused, cross-disciplinary discussion on representations and processes in the mental lexicon. People are known to understand, memorise and parse words in a context-sensitive, opportunistic way, by caching their most habitual and productive processing patterns into routinized behavioural schemes, similarly to what we observe for sequences of coordinated motor acts. Speakers, however, do not only take advantage of token-based information such as frequency of individual, holistically stored words, or episodic memories of word usage, but they are also able to organise stored word forms through abstract paradigmatic structures (or word families) whose overall size and distribution are important determinants of lexical categorisation, inference and productivity. Lexical organisation is, in fact, not necessarily functional to descriptive economy and minimisation of storage, but appears to be influenced by more dynamic, communicationoriented functions such as memorisation, prediction-based recognition and production. Lending support to this view, usage-based approaches to word processing have recently offered novel explanatory frameworks that capitalise on the stable correlation patterns between lexical representations on the one hand and process-based operations that make representations functional to communicative exchanges on the other hand. By focusing on the battery of cognitive functions supporting verbal communication (ranging from input recoding to rehearsal, access, recall and coactivation) and by exploring their psycholinguistic correlates and neuroanatomical substrates, these approaches promote a new view of language architecture as an emergent property of the interaction between language-specific input conditions and low-level, domain-specific cognitive predispositions

Native and non-native processing of morphologically complex words in Italian

The present work focuses on the organization of the mental lexicon in native and non-native speakers and aims at investigating whether words are connected in the mind in terms of morphological criteria, i.e., through a network of associations establishing when a co-occurrence of form and meaning is found. Psycholinguistic research on native lexical access has demonstrated that morphology indeed underlies the organization of the mental lexicon, even though controversies about the locus of this level of organization remain. On the other hand, research in the field of second language acquisition has only recently turned to investigate such issues and its findings so far have been controversial. Specifically, the debate centers on whether native and non-native speakers share the same processing systems. According to recent proposals (Heyer & Clahsen 2015), this would not be the case and L2 processing would be more affected by formal rather than morphological criteria. In this light, the present work is aimed at verifying the impact of formal characteristics in native and non-native lexical access focusing on the processing of formally transparent versus non-transparent words in Italian. Two morphological phenomena are investigated by means of four psycholinguistic experiments involving a lexical decision task combined with the masked priming paradigm. Experiments 1 & 2 compare the processing of allomorphic vs non-allomorphic derivatives, to investigate whether formal alterations impair the appreciation of the relationship between two morphologically related words. Experiments 3 & 4 are focused on lack of base autonomy found in so-called bound stems, i.e., stems which cannot occur in isolation and are aimed at determining whether the processing of free and bound stems differs. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that allomorphic variation does not influence the associations established among related words in native speakers, in line with the predictions that can be formulated within usage-based perspectives on language. Non-native speakers, on the other hand, seem to be more pervasively affected by the phonological/orthographical properties of words, but not to the point that transparent morphological relations can be reduced to mere form overlap shared by morphological relatives. Likewise, stem autonomy was not found to affect the way words containing bound and free stems are processed by native speakers, at least under certain conditions, suggesting that boundedness is not an issue influencing the establishment of morphological relationships among words. Non-native speakers, however, were found to be sensitive to the isolability of the stem, in a way that suggests that free bases may be more salient morphological units for them, as opposed to bound stems, which are seemingly more closely associated with orthographic strings resembling each other. Taken together, the findings of the present work suggest a model of the native mental lexicon based on words and morphological schemas emerging from the relationships establishing among them, despite phonological variations and stem boundedness. While it is unclear whether such a system of connections and schemas is equally strong in the non-native lexicon, morphological relationships still appear to drive lexical organization. Crucially, however, such organization is modulated by form, as demonstrated by the effects of phonological variations and lack of base autonomy

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

This volume presents results of bilateral research project BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse) funded by ANR & FWF. Differences between the two languages with respect to the processing of morphonotactic (MPH) vs. phonotactic (PH) consonant clusters are shown for the first time, the linguistically challenging claim that differences between MPH and PH are also realized phonetically is refuted, and the importance of the relative morphological richness of a language is illustrated.Der Band zeigt Ergebnisse des von ANR & FWF geförderten, bilateralen Forschungsprojekts BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse). Unterschiede zwischen beiden Sprachen in Bezug auf die Verarbeitung morphonotaktischer (MPH) vs. phonotaktischer (PH) Konsonantengruppen werden erstmalig aufgezeigt, die sprachtheoretisch herausfordernde Behauptung, dass Unterschiede zwischen MPH und PH auch phonetisch realisiert werden, widerlegt, und die Wichtigkeit des relativen morphologischen Reichtums einer Sprache veranschaulich

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

This volume presents results of bilateral research project BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse) funded by ANR & FWF. Differences between the two languages with respect to the processing of morphonotactic (MPH) vs. phonotactic (PH) consonant clusters are shown for the first time, the linguistically challenging claim that differences between MPH and PH are also realized phonetically is refuted, and the importance of the relative morphological richness of a language is illustrated.Der Band zeigt Ergebnisse des von ANR & FWF geförderten, bilateralen Forschungsprojekts BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse). Unterschiede zwischen beiden Sprachen in Bezug auf die Verarbeitung morphonotaktischer (MPH) vs. phonotaktischer (PH) Konsonantengruppen werden erstmalig aufgezeigt, die sprachtheoretisch herausfordernde Behauptung, dass Unterschiede zwischen MPH und PH auch phonetisch realisiert werden, widerlegt, und die Wichtigkeit des relativen morphologischen Reichtums einer Sprache veranschaulicht

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

This volume presents results of bilateral research project BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse) funded by ANR & FWF. Differences between the two languages with respect to the processing of morphonotactic (MPH) vs. phonotactic (PH) consonant clusters are shown for the first time, the linguistically challenging claim that differences between MPH and PH are also realized phonetically is refuted, and the importance of the relative morphological richness of a language is illustrated

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

This volume presents results of bilateral research project BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse) funded by ANR & FWF. Differences between the two languages with respect to the processing of morphonotactic (MPH) vs. phonotactic (PH) consonant clusters are shown for the first time, the linguistically challenging claim that differences between MPH and PH are also realized phonetically is refuted, and the importance of the relative morphological richness of a language is illustrated

First verbs : On the way to mini-paradigms

This 18th issue of ZAS-Papers in Linguistics consists of papers on the development of verb acquisition in 9 languages from the very early stages up to the onset of paradigm construction. Each of the 10 papers deals with first-Ianguage developmental processes in one or two children studied via longitudinal data. The languages involved are French, Spanish, Russian, Croatian, Lithuanien, Finnish, English and German. For German two different varieties are examined, one from Berlin and one from Vienna. All papers are based on presentations at the workshop 'Early verbs: On the way to mini-paradigms' held at the ZAS (Berlin) on the 30./31. of September 2000. This workshop brought to a close the first phase of cooperation between two projects on language acquisition which has started in October 1999: a) the project on "Syntaktische Konsequenzen des Morphologieerwerbs" at the ZAS (Berlin) headed by Juergen Weissenborn and Ewald Lang, and financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and b) the international "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition" coordinated by Wolfgang U. Dressler in behalf of the Austrian Academy of Sciences