Psycholinguistics-Morphology

How are these words related?

• 1-nurse/doctor, pillar/column, tree/leaf

• 2-leave/leaf, burn/urn/ though/through, red/bread

• 3-teach/taught, speak/speaker, goat/goats, ox/oxen

How are these words related?

• A-Serenity/serene, water/watering, proof/prove, read/reread

  B-receive/deceive, transmit/remit

• C-transmit/transmission, redeem/redemption, fall/fell electric/electricity, ten/tithe, brother/bretheren, child/children

• D-teach/teacher, friend/friendly, walk/walked

• E-go/went, good/best, am/is

Participate in a psycholinguistic experiment (Choose a short one)

• Max Planck Institute

• Word Games

Lexical Decision Task

• prime

• target

• priming effect-inhibitory, facilitory

• cross-modal

• lag

Example of LDT test items:

tubes

govern

jubbing

bribe

leckom

tubes

trade

flup

government

kepter

allowing

leckom

tribe

flupper

swap

rejont

allow

Types of Priming

• A-real word repetition priming (tubes)

• B-non-word repetition priming (leckom)

• C-semantic priming (trade/swap; sea/ocean; mouse/cheese)

• D-orthographic priming (tribe/bribe)

• E-morphological priming (govern/government; sing/sang; walk/walking)

• F-non-word morphological priming (flup/flupper),

What happens if you vary orthographic/phonological overlap?

What happens if you vary semantic relatedness?

High semantic relationship create/creation

Low semantic relationship create/creature

All words matched on ortho overlap and semantic similarity (speaker judgments) of 1 and 3 matched.

    1-high semantic relationship, morpheme in common adapter / adaptable

    2-Low semantic relationship, historical morpheme in common part / apartment

    3-high semantic relationship, no morpheme in common scream / screech

1 and 2 primed better than 3 so it's the morph in spite of varying semantics that causes priming.

semantically transparent: friendly / friend and govern / government.

semantically opaque: depart / department and author / authority.

What role does morphology play in recognizing words?

If we parse into morphemes (un+willing+ly) then polymorphemic should take more time to recognize than monomorphemic (holding word length constant).

Various hypotheses:

1-Full listing

2-Full parsing

3-Race between parsing and access to whole word

4-Dual-route: depends on regularity of word

Evidence for full listing:

Frequency affect reaction time 

cumulative frequency is freq of 'river' plus freq of 'rivers' (freq of r-i-v-e-r)

singular frequency is freq of 'river'

plural frequency is freq of 'rivers'

River		Rivers
Windows	Window

If cumulative freq affects RT then it looks like -s is stripped off

If individual freq affect RT then it looks like each form exists in mind

Evidence for parsing

barking