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Structure of English
Evidence for morphological
structure
Morphology
Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to
look at the word itself. Mankind. Basically, its made
up of two separate words - mank and ind. What do
these words mean? Its a mystery, and thats why so
is mankind.
Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
Morphemes
Morphology is the study of morphemes and
their behavior.
A morpheme is the minimal unit of meaning.
dogs contains 2 morphemes:
Rule-governed behavior
Priming studies
Event Related Potentials
Speech errors
Disorders
New singulars
indice,
homo sapien
New morphemes
-a/oholic
-burger
-gate:
-head:
Watergate, Fornigate
pothead, metalhead, techhead,
gearhead, theoryhead,
crackhead, hockey head
Mc-:
McJob (mkdZAb) n.
A low-paying job that
requires little skill and
provides little opportunity
for advancement.
Source: Merriam-Webster
Online
Psycholinguistic
evidence
Over-regularization
went goed went
Happens c. late twos
Suggests acquisition of morphological
rules
Wug tests
Berko 1958
3 surface manifestations of English regular plural /-z/: [z], [s],
[z]
When/how do children learn these rules?
Test paradigm
Results
Very young children are baffled by the question and are unable to
answer correctly, responding with e.g. two wug."
Children in grade 1 were almost fully competent with both [s] and
[z].
Both preschool and first-grade children dealt poorly with [z],
giving the correct answer less than half the time, possibly because
it occurs in the most restrictive context.
Major finding
Productive irregulars
Sample Over-Irregularizations
children
pake pakeded
bling blung, blang
flink flunk
frim frand
adults
mang mung
shride shrude
bling blank
morget morgot
tind tind
ERPs
Prediction
Results
Conclusion
Broth:Brothel:Brother
Morphological
speech errors
Morphological errors
Morpheme exchange
slicely thinned
Feature shift
have to went for had to go
Faulty access
have teachen for have taught
concludement for conclusion
General logic:
Inflectional morphemes (e.g. -ed, -ing, -s) are much more error prone than
derivational morphemes (e.g. -er, -ness, -able, -ion) (Garrett 1980,
Humphreys, 2002).
Can we also find experimental speech error evidence of derivational
decomposition?
Prediction:
If derivational morphemes are stored independently from their stems,
more morphological speech errors should occur when -er is a real
morpheme than when it is only a pseudo-morpheme.
English derivational -er
cpv adj
nice+er
agentive
work+er
pseudo-morph
summer
Method
Results
Morphological
disorders
Lexical disorder
Badecker 2001
picture naming
butterfly
butterfly
doctor fly
sun
wheel pill
Semantic disorders
Deep dyslexia = semantic errors during
reading
Buchanan et al. 2003
Deep
Experiment
Method
-O
T-
DOORMAN
SHOEHORN
O-
POTHOLE
DEADLINE
Results
94 stimuli
10 read correctly; 9 of these were TT
Transparent components read correctly more often
Key point: if there were no decomposition, all compound types should show the
same error rate
Response to PANCAKE:
cake, breakfast, man,. . .cake, man. . .cake, mancake, man, man, p-, p-, cake,
birthday, breakfast, cake, p-a-n. . . cake, syrup...
Typical semantic error: [target] cake [output] birthday (shows decomposition)
NB 2nd and last attempts are semantic associate for the whole compound
(BREAKFAST, SYRUP)
-T
Shows successful access of meaning of the compound, even though she never manages to say
the whole thing
Conclusion
Deep dyslexia
Observation:
Prediction:
Result:
the left inferior frontal cortex (along with the basal ganglia) is involved in rule-based
computations
Irregular forms dealt with differently
Prediction:
Test:
anterior aphasics and Parkinson patients performed worse with regular than irregular verbs
the opposite for posterior aphasics and Alzheimer patients
Conclusion:
Four types of patients: Parkinsons, Alzheimers, anterior aphasics, and posterior aphasics
Patients were asked to perform a sentence completion task requiring the production of a verb
in the past tense
E.g. Every day I dig a hole. Just like every day, yesterday I ____ a hole
Results:
A lesion to this region should impair only regular morphological processes, sparing the ability
to produce irregular morphology.
But
Results consistent with theory that the left frontal cortex and basal ganglia are involved in
rule-based language processing but not in the processing of irregular morphology, and that
temporal lobe areas are implicated in the storage of lexical forms.
Consistent
Conclusions
Humans decompose words into morphemes
and store them as such.
Both regular and irregular/restricted morphology
involve rule-governed (de)composition.
blang,
corner
References
Andrews, S. 1986. Morphological influences on lexical access: Lexical or nonlexical effects? Journal of Memory
and Language, 25, 726-740.
Andrews, S., B. Miller, & K. Rayner. 2004. Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words:
There is a mouse in mousetrap. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 16:285-311.
Badecker, William. 2001. Lexical composition and the production of compounds: evidence from errors in naming.
Language and Cognitive Processes 16.4.
Buchanan, Lori, Shannon McEwen, Chris Westbury, and Gary Libben. 2003. Semantics and semantic errors:
Implicit access to semantic information from words and nonwords in deep dyslexia. Brain and Language
84:6583.
Caramazza, Alfonso, Alessandro Laudanna, and Cristina Romani. 1988. Lexical access and inflectional
morphology. Cognition 28.
Fiorentino, Robert. 2006. Masked priming of compound constituents: Implications for morphological
decomposition. Manuscript, University of Maryland.
Janssen, Dirk and Karin Humphreys. 2002. Morphological speech errors on agentive and comparative affixes.
Third International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Banff, Canada.
McKinnon, R., M. Allen, & L. Osterhout. 2003. Morphological decomposition involving non-productive
morphemes: ERP Evidence. Neuroreport 14:883-886.
Marslen-Wilson et al. 1994. Psychol Rev 101:3-33.
Rastle, Kathleen, Matthew Davis, and Boris New. 2004. The Broth in my Brothers Brothel: Morpho-Orthographic
Segmentation in Visual Word Recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11.6:1090-1098.
Rastle, Kathleen, et al. 2005. New evidence for morphological errors in deep dyslexia. Brain and Language
97:189-199.
Shapiro, K., & Alfonso Caramazza. 2003. Looming a loom: Evidence for independent access to grammatical and
phonological properties in verb retrieval. Journal of Neurolinguistics 16:85-111.