Title: Exo-lexical variables in monolingual and bilingual morphological processing.
Dates: February 9 and 11, 2012
Convenors:
Madeleine Voga, department of Modern Greek studies, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier III Hélène Giraudo, ERSS-CLLE, CNRS and University Le Mirail Toulouse II
Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, department of Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Confirmed invited speakers: Harald Baayen, University of Alberta Vito Pirelli, University of Pisa
Scientific/selection committee:
Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Olivier Bonami, University Paris-Sorbonne
Hélène Giraudo, University Le Mirail Toulouse II Carita Paradis, Lund University
Madeleine Voga, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier III.
Abstract submission :
Abstracts (max. 700 words) should be sent to mvoga@free.fr Deadline for abstract submission: September 30, 2011 Notification of acceptance: October, 15, 2011
For further information, please contact the convenors: Madeleine Voga (mvoga@free.fr), Hélène Giraudo (giraudo@univ-tlse2.fr) or Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis (ansym@lit.auth.gr).
Workshop description
The question of how the lexicon is organized in terms of structural units and how these units interact with each other during lexical access and subsequently during morphological processing, has been a controversial field for a long time. The morpheme versus lexeme problem is still unsolved, but several pieces of psycholinguistic evidence have come to corroborate the hypothesis according to which the locus of morphological effects is not situated exclusively inside the lexical unit but should be extended to its environment. In fact, one of the difficulties of the study of morphology for alphabetic languages is that not only morphology is correlated with semantic, orthographic and phonological factors, but also that stems and inflected or derived words exist as free word-forms, entertaining different interrelations.
Several kinds of effects support this general hypothesis: first, the morphological family size effect, put forward by Baayen and his colleagues (ex. de Jong, Schreuder & Baayen, 2000), according to which (schematically), the stronger is the morphological family, the easier is the identification of the family member presented as target of the recognition. These data suggest a view of the lexicon in which units other than the word itself act as synagonists during morphological processing. Symmetrically, there is evidence that lexical units orthographically but not morphologically related act as antagonists in lexical processing. With the masked priming technique, Grainger, Colé & Segui (1991) have found that orthographic similarity of the prime affects (inhibits) lexical access of morphologically complex targets, despite (or because of) the absence of any morphological relation between them. For example, the prime mûrir (ripen) inhibits the target MURAL (wall) and this is accounted for in terms of
preactivation of lexical representations during the processing of the prime, interfering with the processing of the target. In the same vein, there is evidence for the inhibitory effect of pseudo-family size (the opposite of the family size variable), i.e. the number of orthographically related but
morphologically unrelated words: processing French inflections (Voga & Giraudo, 2009) and derivations (Voga & Giraudo, under revision) is influenced by this variable. The outcoming of these data is that the more important the pseudo-family size, the stronger the inhibition, with frequency playing an important role, particularly in inflectional priming.
The idea of competition taking place at the lexical level and possibly influencing what happens at the morphological level is not novel, since it is central for interactive activation models (e.g., Bowers, Davis, Hanley, 2005; Grainger & Jacobs, 1996; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) as well as for other types of lexical organization (Bybee, 2007). Recent findings indicate that interference can also be exerted by items that acquired their lexical status during the experiment. Bowers et al. (2005) have shown that having participants learn new words (e.g., BANARA) that were neighbors of familiar words that previously had no neighbors (e.g., BANANA), made it more difficult to semantically categorize the familiar words. The surface frequency of the materials plays an important role in the effects mentioned here as it is an important variable in interactive activation (McClelland &
Rumelhart, 1981) as well as in serial (Forster, 1976) models, defining the “resting level” or residual activation of a given lexical unit, and consequently, the amount of activation needed to reach the identification threshold. For example, Giraudo and Grainger (2000) demonstrated under masked conditions that high surface frequency derived primes induce facilitation whereas low frequency primes do not.
To summarize, different kinds of effects related to lexical competition, as well as “classic” effects such as morphological family size, come to confirm that the morphological processing extends to the environment of the lexical unit, whether this should be done positively, by the activation of family members, or negatively, through the activation of various competitors. In the degree that morphology is viewed (at least by many researchers) as the extension of patterns of existing systematic form- meaning correspondences between words (Bybee, 1988; 2001, Booij, 2002) we consider this direction to be very promising as far as morphological representation and processing is concerned. We invite participations to help answering the following questions:
Which are these “exo-lexical” (situated outside the word itself) or exo-systematic (ex. frequency) variables influencing morphological processing of inflections and derivations? How are they operating? Are they operating in the same degree/manner for inflected and derived words? How do they interact?
Is it possible to review conflicting data on morphological processing under the light of this kind of variable, neglected because of the predominance of the morpheme based approaches in the
psycholinguistic literature?
How can these paradigmatic relations extend to bilingual processing? According to Bybee (1988) the organization of the mental lexicon in terms of lexical clusters should transcend languages, but convincing pieces of evidence on this question are lacking, suffering also from experimental
constraints to distinguish morphological from other effects (orthographic, phonological and semantic),
not easy to satisfy in the same-script experiments. From this point of view, cross-script experimental work is welcome.
How can these variables help furthering the specification of lexemes?
References
Booij, G. E. (2002), The Morphology of Dutch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bowers, J.S., Davis, C.J., & Hanley, D. (2005a). Interfering Neighbours: The impact of novel word learning on the identification of visually similar words. Cognition, 97(3), B45-B54.
Bybee, J. (1988). Morphology as lexical organisation. In M. Hammond and M. Noonan (eds). Theoretical Morphology. Approaches to modern linguistics. San Diego : Academic Press, 119-142.
Bybee, J. (2007). Frequency of use and the organization of language. Oxford University Press.
De Jong, N., Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2000). The morphological family size effect and morphology.
Language and Cognitive Processes 15, 329-365.
Forster, K. I. (1976). Accessing the internal lexicon. In R. J. Wales & E. C. T. Walker (Eds.), New approaches to language mechanisms. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Giraudo, H., & Grainger, J. (2000). Effects of prime word frequency and cumulative root frequency in masked morphological priming. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 421-444.
Grainger, J., Colé, P., & Segui, J. (1991). Masked morphological priming in visual word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 370-384.
Grainger, J., & Jacobs, A. M. (1996). Orthographic processing in visual word recognition: A multiple read-out model. Psychological Review, 103, 518-565.
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D.E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1. An account of basic findings. Psychological Review, 88, 375-407.
Voga, M. & Giraudo, H. (2009). Pseudo-Family size influences the processing of French Inflections: evidence in favor of a supra-lexical account. Selected Proceedings of the 6th Décembrettes, ed. Fabio Montermini, Gilles Boyé, and Jesse Tseng, 148-155. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Voga, M., Giraudo, H. Status of lexical competition within the derivational and inflectional paradigm: some evidence from masked priming with French stimuli (under revision).
