Sensitivity to Inflectional Morphemes in the Absence of Meaning: Evidence from a Novel Task

Autor/inn/en	Cilibrasi, Luca; Stojanovik, Vesna; Riddell, Patricia; Saddy, Douglas
Titel	Sensitivity to Inflectional Morphemes in the Absence of Meaning: Evidence from a Novel Task
Quelle	In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 48 (2019) 3, S.747-767 (21 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Cilibrasi, Luca)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0090-6905
DOI	10.1007/s10936-019-09629-y
Schlagwörter	Morphemes; Task Analysis; Morphology (Languages); Native Speakers; English; Decision Making; Phonology; Grammar; Cues; Language Processing; Psycholinguistics + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Morphem; Aufgabenanalyse; Morphology; Morphologie; Muttersprachler; English language; Englisch; Decision-making; Entscheidungsfindung; Fonologie; Grammatik; Stichwort; Sprachverarbeitung; Psycholinguistik
Abstract	A number of studies in different languages have shown that speakers may be sensitive to the presence of inflectional morphology in the absence of verb meaning (Caramazza et al. in Cognition 28(3):297-332, 1988; Clahsen in Behav Brain Sci 22(06):991-1013, 1999; Post et al. in Cognition 109(1):1-17, 2008). In this study, sensitivity to inflectional morphemes was tested in a purposely developed task with English-like nonwords. Native speakers of English were presented with pairs of nonwords and were asked to judge whether the two nonwords in each pair were the same or different. Each pair was composed either of the same nonword repeated twice, or of two slightly different nonwords. The nonwords were created taking advantage of a specific morphophonological property of English, which is that regular inflectional morphemes agree in voicing with the ending of the stem. Using stems ending in /l/, thus, we created: (1) nonwords ending in potential inflectional morphemes, v?ld, (2) nonwords without inflectional morphemes, v?lt, and (3) a phonological control condition, v?lb. Our new task endorses some strengths presented in previous work. As in Post et al. (2008) the task accounts for the importance of phonological cues to morphological processing. In addition, as in Caramazza et al. (1988) and contrary to Post et al. (2008), the task never presents bare-stems, making it unlikely that the participants would be aware of the manipulation performed. Our results are in line with Caramazza et al. (1988), Clahsen (1999) and Post et al. (2008), and offer further evidence that morphologically inflected nonwords take longer to be discriminated compared to uninflected nonwords. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01