Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

Language and Linguistics in a Complex World Data, Interdisciplinarity, Transfer, and the Next Generation. ICAME41 Extended Book of Abstracts

This is a collection of papers, work-in-progress reports, and other contributions that were part of the ICAME41 digital conference

The cognitive reality of morphomes (raw data and scripts)

This study reports and discusses the results of a pilot psycholinguistic investigation into the morphome – a term created (Aronoff 1994) to indicate systematic relations between form and meaning in morphology which lack synchronic semantic, functional, or phonological determinants and are thereby purely morphological. Despite a general consensus (cf. Bermúdez-Otero & Luís 2016) on the need to approach the question of the existence and nature of morphomic structures experimentally and interdisciplinarily, there has been no study beyond Nevins, Rodrigues, and Tang (2015), which focused on the morphomic structure in Romance verb morphology identified by Maiden (1992) and labelled (arbitrarily) the ‘Lpattern’ and concluded that in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese this structure is no longer part of native speakers’ grammar. The present study has replicated, for Italian, the basic experimental design of Nevins et al. It has obtained behavioural measurements (from two experiments) and eyetracking measures (from one experiment). All these measurements converge in showing (i) a statistically significant preference for target items that are consistent with the L-/Upattern distribution and (ii) a faster decision-making process when the L-item was chosen. We conclude that (pace Nevins et al.) this morphomic structure is part of the internalized grammar of Italian adult speakers

Überachiever or Developerin: Eye movements during the processing of translingual hybrid noun-formations

This eye tracking experiment tests how the brain recognizes and processes hybrid German-English word-formations and how this process compares to monolingual items. Thirty bilingual German-English adults from the Oxford area (23 females; mean age = 28.0, SD = 9.3) who were familiar with the meaning and underlying structure of the individual components had no comprehension difficulties. After fitting linear mixed effects models (95 % CI), the results showed an effect of word length and previous exposure to hybrid forms on processing times, indicated by longer fixation times and increased regressions, particularly in later stages of lexical processing. This indicates that bilingual readers have no trouble recognizing hybrid words, but may have difficulty with semantic and syntactic integration due to lack of exposure