Teasing apart Syntactic Category vs. Argument Structure Information in Deverbal Word Formation: a comparative psycholinguistic study.

Deverbal word formation is subject to two distinct types of constraints, those concerning the syntactic category of the base (categorial constraints) and those relating to the thematic properties of the verb (thematic constraints). For instance, -able suffixation involves a transitive verb with argument structure >, as in to train > trainable. Violation of these constraints results in the creation of pseudo-words with categorial (e.g. riverable) or thematic violations (e.g. arrivable). The study discusses psycholinguistic experiments involving these types of deverbal pseudo-words, in Greek and English, two languages with morphologically distinct properties. Greek has a rich derivational system with a variety of deverbal formations, which follow strong constraints, in the sense that most suffixes that participate in deverbal word formation lack the polysemy that allows them to attach to other-than-verbal bases. English, on the other hand, demonstrates an equally rich derivational system, but it differs in two crucial ways: (a) there is significant affix homophony (e.g. -er is a nominalizer if attached to verbal stems, or forms the comparative if attached to adjectives), (b) it is extremely permissive in allowing zero-derived verbs (to fax). In an off-line and two on-line lexical decision tasks we investigated whether categorial and thematic constraints are treated in the same way by speakers of both languages. Results showed that speakers of both languages differentiated between pseudo-words that violate these two types of constraints both when it comes to acceptance rates and processing time. Taking together results from both languages, we make claims about the structured mental representation of deverbal derivatives and the fact that their various properties can be accessed via distinct operations and at distinct points of time. Implications for the psycholinguistic theory of lexical access and the morphological theory of word formation are also discussed

Does linear position matter for morphological processing? Evidence from a Tagalog masked priming experiment

This study investigated morphological decomposition of Tagalog infixed, prefixed, and suffixed words using the masked priming paradigm. We directly compared morphological priming of infixed, ni- prefixed and -in suffixed words to examine whether infixes are processed similarly to other affixes during early and automatic decomposition. We found significant priming effects for infixed, prefixed, and suffixed words, but no semantic or orthographic similarity priming. Magnitudes of priming effects for infixed and prefixed words were not significantly different, suggesting that decomposition of infixed words was not more costly for Tagalog speakers, contrary to phonological readjustment-based accounts of infixation. This is the first psycholinguistic experiment showing that infixed words are decomposed into morphological units during visual word recognition. We provide evidence that the imperfect edge-alignment of the stem within infixed words does not hamper the early morphological decomposition mechanisms, suggesting that edge-alignment might not be critical to trigger activation of morphological units

Early Form Based Morphological Decomposition in Tagalog: MEG Evidence from Reduplication, Infixation and Circumfixation

Neuro-and psycholinguistic experimentation supports the early decomposition of morphologically complex words within the ventral processing stream, which MEG has localized to the M170 response in the (left) visual word form area ( VWFA). Decomposition into an exhaustive parse of visual morpheme forms extends beyond words like farmer to those imitating complexity (e.g., brother; Lewis et al., 2011), and to “unique” stems occurring in only one word but following the syntax and semantics of their affix (e.g., vulnerable; Gwilliams & Marantz, 2018). Evidence comes primarily from suffixation; other morphological processes have been under-investigated. This study explores circumfixation, infixation, and reduplication in Tagalog. In addition to investigating whether these are parsed like suffixation, we address an outstanding question concerning semantically empty morphemes. Some words in Tagalog resemble English winter as decomposition is not supported (wint-er); these apparently reduplicated pseudoreduplicates lack the syntactic and semantic features of reduplicated forms. However, unlike winter, these words exhibit phonological behavior predicted only if they involve a reduplicating morpheme. If these are decomposed, this provides evidence that words are analyzed as complex, like English vulnerable, when the grammar demands it. In a lexical decision task with MEG, we find that VWFA activity correlates with stem:word transition probability for circumfixed, infixed, and reduplicated words. Furthermore, a Bayesian analysis suggests that pseudoreduplicates with reduplicate-like phonology are also decomposed; other pseudoreduplicates are not. These findings are consistent with an interpretation that decomposition is modulated by phonology in addition to syntax and semantics

A new look at the ‘Generic Overgeneralisation’ effect

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy on 24/02/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2017.1285993peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sinq20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sinq20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sinq20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sinq20While generic generalisations have been studied by linguists and philosophers for decades, they have only recently become the focus of concentrated interest by cognitive and developmental psychologists, who propose the generics-as-default view. In this paper we focus on the ‘Generic Overgeneralisation’ (GOG) effect proposed by Leslie and colleagues and the native speaker judgments that have been used to support it, and by extension, the generics-as-default view. We take a step back to look at the history of the GOG effect in order to contextualise it. We review existing experimental evidence and discuss four non-mutually exclusive explanations for the GOG effect: ignorance, subkind interpretation, atypical behaviour of all and quantifier domain restriction. We conclude that a closer look at the semantics and pragmatics of generics and universal quantifiers may provide a more nuanced explanation for the pattern of judgment data than that proposed by the generics-as-default view

Two kinds of pink: development and difference in Germanic colour semantics

Max Planck Gesellschaft

Processing compound words: evidence from synaesthesia

This study used grapheme-colour synaesthesia, a neurological condition where letters evoke a strong and consistent impression of colour, as a tool to investigate normal language processing. For two sets of compound words varying by lexical frequency (e.g., football vs lifevest) or semantic transparency (e.g., flagpole vs magpie), we asked 19 grapheme-colour synaesthetes to choose their dominant synaesthetic colour using an online colour palette. Synaesthetes could then select a second synaesthetic colour for each word if they experienced one. For each word, we measured the number of elicited synaesthetic colours (zero, one, or two) and the nature of those colours (in terms of their saturation and luminance values). In the first analysis, we found that the number of colours was significantly influenced by compound frequency, such that the probability of a one-colour response increased with frequency. However, semantic transparency did not influence the number of synaesthetic colours. In the second analysis, we found that the luminance of the dominant colour was predicted by the frequency of the first constituent (e.g. rain in rainbow). We also found that the dominant colour was significantly more luminant than the secondary colour. Our results show the influence of implicit linguistic measures on synaesthetic colours, and support multiple/dual-route models of compound processing

Processing (the) events: Lexical and structural ingredients of inner aspect

What is the aspectual representation of verbs and how is that representation used to construct the aspectual interpretation of a sentence during online sentence processing? In this paper we use psycholinguistic techniques to address both these questions. In the first experiment, a processing correlate of telicity is identified by manipulating verbal telicity (inherently telic vs. unspecified verbs) and direct object quantization, finding a principled delay in the use of these verbs’ aspectual representation in which both the verb and its internal argument are required before the comprehension system can commit to a telic or atelic interpretation. In the second experiment, this processing correlate reveals no differences in processing between inherently atelic and unspecified verbs, delayed or otherwise. We argue that together these experiments support theories that distinguish between two verb classi- fications, a class of inherently telic verbs and a class of unspecified verbs, but not those that include a class of inherently atelic verbs