Psycholinguistically Motivated Computational Models on the Organization and Processing of Morphologically Complex Words

In this work we present psycholinguistically motivated computational models for the organization and processing of Bangla morphologically complex words in the mental lexicon. Our goal is to identify whether morphologically complex words are stored as a whole or are they organized along the morphological line. For this, we have conducted a series of psycholinguistic experiments to build up hypothesis on the possible organizational structure of the mental lexicon. Next, we develop computational models based on the collected dataset. We observed that derivationally suffixed Bangla words are in general decomposed during processing and compositionality between the stem and the suffix plays an important role in the decomposition process. We observed the same phenomena for Bangla verb sequences where experiments showed noncompositional verb sequences are in general stored as a whole in the ML and low traces of compositional verbs are found in the mental lexicon.