Decompositional Representation of Morphological Complexity: Multivariate fMRI Evidence from Italian.

Derivational morphology is a cross-linguistically dominant mechanism for word formation, combining existing words with derivational affixes to create new word forms. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the representation and processing of such forms remain unclear. Recent cross-linguistic neuroimaging research suggests that derived words are stored and accessed as whole forms, without engaging the left-hemisphere perisylvian network associated with combinatorial processing of syntactically and inflectionally complex forms. Using fMRI with a "simple listening" no-task procedure, we reexamine these suggestions in the context of the root-based combinatorially rich Italian lexicon to clarify the role of semantic transparency (between the derived form and its stem) and affix productivity in determining whether derived forms are decompositionally represented and which neural systems are involved. Combined univariate and multivariate analyses reveal a key role for semantic transparency, modulated by affix productivity. Opaque forms show strong cohort competition effects, especially for words with nonproductive suffixes (ventura, "destiny"). The bilateral frontotemporal activity associated with these effects indicates that opaque derived words are processed as whole forms in the bihemispheric language system. Semantically transparent words with productive affixes (libreria, "bookshop") showed no effects of lexical competition, suggesting morphologically structured co-representation of these derived forms and their stems, whereas transparent forms with nonproductive affixes (pineta, pine forest) show intermediate effects. Further multivariate analyses of the transparent derived forms revealed affix productivity effects selectively involving left inferior frontal regions, suggesting that the combinatorial and decompositional processes triggered by such forms can vary significantly across languages.This research was supported by an Advanced Investigator grant to WMW from the European Research Council (AdG 230570 NEUROLEX) and by MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBSU) funding to WMW (U.1055.04.002.00001.01). Computing resources were provided by the MRC CBSU.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from MIT Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_0100

Morphological productivity and the decomposition of complex words

This thesis addresses the role that morphological productivity plays in the process of morphological decomposition. Understanding the role of productivity is crucial, as previ-ous literature has shown words to be decomposable across-the-board into their morphem-ic parts or employing both decomposition into morphemic parts and whole-word storage. Previous research has also shown that in a masked priming experiment, morphologically complex words are decomposed in terms of morphological parts (e.g., cleaner; clean + -er) and potential morphological parts (e.g., corner; corn + -er). However, the extent to which properties beyond morpho-orthographic segmentation, such as productivity, con-strains this process remains unclear. In a masked priming experiment, we examined the role of productivity in morpholog-ically complex word processing, testing whether both morphologically complex words with productive (e.g., -ness) and unproductive (e.g., -ity) suffixes are decomposed into morpheme-level constituents or whether only productive suffixes are decomposed while unproductive are stored. Our response time results did not support morpheme-level pro-cessing, as all of our conditions showed similar priming results. However, our accuracy results argue for a decomposition process sensitive to potential morphologically-complex and potential morphological words. We conclude based on the response time and accuracy differences that the priming effects in our experiment were not modulated by our productivity manipulation. Therefore, productivity is not a factor that constrains the ini-tial stages of lexical access

The linguistics of gender

This chapter explores grammatical gender as a linguistic phenomenon. First, I define gender in terms of agreement, and look at the parts of speech that can take gender agreement. Because it relates to assumptions underlying much psycholinguistic gender research, I also examine the reasons why gender systems are thought to emerge, change, and disappear. Then, I describe the gender system of Dutch. The frequent confusion about the number of genders in Dutch will be resolved by looking at the history of the system, and the role of pronominal reference therein. In addition, I report on three lexical- statistical analyses of the distribution of genders in the language. After having dealt with Dutch, I look at whether the genders of Dutch and other languages are more or less randomly assigned, or whether there is some system to it. In contrast to what many people think, regularities do indeed exist. Native speakers could in principle exploit such regularities to compute rather than memorize gender, at least in part. Although this should be taken into account as a possibility, I will also argue that it is by no means a necessary implication

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

Morphological Analysis on the Word Formation Found in the ”Jakarta Post Newspaper”

This research discussed about kinds and word formation process on art and culture column in the ‖Jakarta Post Newspaper‖ which aimed to describe the kinds of word formation process on art and culture used in the newspaper.This research based on Yule and O‘Grady & Dobrovolsky‘s theory of kinds of word formation process. This research was descriptive qualitative method. The data were taken from art and culture column in the Jakarta Post Newspaper, December 2017 edition. The researcher actually used note taking as the instrument in order to get the valid data. The findings showed that there were 48 data contained word formation which actually divided into five kinds of word formation process. They were: affixation (23 data), borrowing (16 data), compounding (5 data), acronym (3 data), and multiple process (one data). The researcher concluded that affixation is the word formation process mostly used on art and culture column in the Jakarta Post Newspaper

Towards a comprehensive understanding of reading

Reading is an activity in which humans routinely engage in on an everyday basis. It is thus not surprising that the question of how we identify and process words has been one of the central interests of psycholinguistic research in the past decades. Indeed, the science of reading has progressed enormously in this time, and we have gained important insights into visual word identification. However, our current understanding of word identification is difficult to extend to text reading\u2014both experiments and theories focus primarily, if not exclusively, on out-of-context individual words. Instead, text reading has been extensively explored through the models of eye movement control in reading. However, their focus lies primarily on the decision of when to move the eyes to the next word and the nature of attention allocation, while they tend to stay clear of the lexical dynamics, described in models of single word processing. While both these fields importantly advanced our knowledge, the entire complexity of reading process surely cannot be addressed while they are kept in isolation. Recently, a shift towards a more integrated approach, joining the findings of both fields, has started to emerge. At the same time, the constant development of new techniques now allows us to address reading under more integrated and natural experimental conditions. We make use of these in the present thesis, where we follow the path from the study of words in isolation towards more ecologically valid study of word processing during sentence reading. Throughout the present work, we approach the reading research in three steps. We start from the individual word processing\u2014in chapter 2, we introduce a masked morphological priming study, in which we address the question of existence of stem and inflectional suffix priming. Following, we move on towards a more integrated approach of visual word identification and text reading\u2014in chapter 3, we study cross-word semantic and morphological priming within sentences in a natural reading, eye tracking experiment. Finally, we try to apply this integrated approach to the study of neural signatures during natural reading\u2014in chapter 4, we use the same cross-word semantic and morphological priming paradigm as in the previous chapter, but we introduce it in a natural sentence reading study in which we simultaneously record the eye movements and electroencephalogram. Taken together, the present work presents three different approaches to the study of morphological and lexical-semantic priming. Throughout these studies, no evidence in support of (inflectional) morphological priming was observed, while solid effect of lexical-semantic priming was observed both in words in isolation, as also in a natural sentence reading. With this, our work indicates that inflectional morphemes behave differently from stems and derivational morphemes in complex word recognition

Mental Representation of Word Family Structure: The Case of German Infinitives, Conversion Nouns and Other Morphologically Related Forms

Published: 27 July 2022This study investigates how two non-finite forms, infinitives and conversion nouns, are represented in the mind of L1 and L2 speakers and what is their relationship to other members of the corresponding word family. German native speakers and proficient German learners with Czech as L1 participated in four overt priming experiments involving a grammatical judgement task. We investigated the relationship between infinitives (Experiment 1) and conversion nouns (Experiment 2) and formally identical verbal or noun forms. We further focussed on the relationship between conversion nouns and regular nominal derivation forms with two derivational suffixes: -er and -ung (Experiments 3 and 4). Our results show that the two non-finite forms differ in their relations to other members of a word family and do not constitute a special class of non-finites as suggested in previous literature. While German infinitives seem to be closer related to finite verbal forms, conversion nouns behave in the same way as other regular nominal derivatives within the same word family. As for the German L1 and L2 contrast, no significant difference in the mental representation of the examined forms was found. This finding suggests that with respect to the explored phenomena, proficient learners rely on the same linguistic organisation as L1 speakers.This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation; grant number BO 3615/6-2 to DB) and by Universität Leipzig within the program of Open Access Publishing

ENG 3360 - Introduction to Language Studies

Language studies cover a large variety of situations as language is embedded in every aspect of our lives. Finding a book that would study all the possible topics related to language is impossible. Therefore, with our UTRGV librarians, we have assembled a free book that covers the basic linguistics concepts you need to know for this course and other linguistics courses. Linguistics concepts such as phonology or language acquisition are not subject to last minute discoveries and the principles remain the same. We hope you enjoy learning more about linguistics thanks to this free resource.https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/oer/1001/thumbnail.jp

Teaching spelling in the middle years: Reviewing programs for diverse student groups

In what follows, I draw attention to understandings about the teaching of Standard Australian English spelling developed by being immersed in the URL project site for four years though sharing professional dialogue with teachers and educators and entering into informal conversations with some of the students and their parents. My understandings focus on the potential and problematics of oft-used generic spelling programs and approaches for student cohorts marked by social, cultural and linguistic diversity. This article concludes by considering two possible extensions to the word study approach that may have utility for working with middle years students from diverse backgrounds: creating a discursive ‘Third Space’ that overtly recognises students’ language experiences and the technique of colour blocking to create a visual stress

ANALYZING ISTRUCTION AND LEARNING OF DERIVATIONAL MORHOLOGY IN THE SPANISH FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

Morphological awareness can help learners of a second language (L2) infer and learn the meaning of unknown words. It is, however, unclear how morphological awareness evolves in adult English-speaking learners of instructed L2 Spanish and how this development relates to vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, the manner in which derivational morphology is instructed is unknown. This dissertation examines these aspects within four studies. Study 1 explores the development of morphological awareness for English-speaking learners of instructed Spanish L2 (n=209) and whether development depends on vocabulary size or other factors, such as proficiency. The results suggest that proficiency is the main predictor of morphological awareness. When morphological awareness was receptively measured, i.e., learners analyzed and identified derivational suffixes, higher levels of awareness were reached even at the lowest proficiency level. When it was productively measured, i.e., learners analyzed, identified, and manipulated derivational suffixes, mastery was only achieved by the most advanced learners. Thus, a partial awareness of morphology precedes a more complete awareness. Moreover, the number of derivational suffixes that these L2 learners manipulated was limited. Study 2 also surveys morphological awareness by making the participants of Study 1 infer the meaning and structure of unknown words. The findings suggest that though all learners rely on derivational morphology but advanced learners deploy morphological awareness the most. Study 3 examines the implicit knowledge of derivational morphology, specifically distributional and semantic knowledge, from the participants of Study 1 and 2. In a timed Lexical Decision Task, learners accurately distinguished violations from non-violations, i.e., learners were aware of distributional and semantic constraints. Learners’ reactions were also dependent on the suffix of the word, which suggests that every suffix can be independently learned and stored. These learners, however, did not show RTs that decreased with proficiency, which suggests they have yet to automatize derivational knowledge. Study 4 uses Borg’s framework (2003) to investigate classroom practices and teachers’ beliefs about derivational morphology for five Spanish instructors at a large university. The classroom observations reveal that derivational teaching is mostly unplanned, incidental, scarce, and, on occasion, ambiguous. Neither textbooks nor teaching training emphasize the teaching of derivational morphology