Affixal salience and the processing of derivational morphology: The role of suffix allomorphy

Abstract

This study explores the relevance of suffix allomorphy for processing complex words. The question is whether structural invariance of the morphological category (i.e., lack of allomorphy) would affect the processing of Finnish derived words. A series of four visual lexical decision experiments in which alternatively surface and base frequency was manipulated showed that the two invariant suffixes, namely denominal -stO and deadjectival -hkO, showed reliable effects of base frequency, whereas for the two categories with suffix allomorphy, deverbal -Us and deadjectival -(U)Us, only surface frequency played a role. A further experiment showed that even with the most frequent variant of -(U)Us, namely -Ude-, response latencies were a function of surface frequency only. It is shown that neither the results from the experiments here nor previous findings from processing Finnish words can be accounted for by suffix frequency, the frequency ratio between the derived word and its base, or morphological productivity in any straightforward manner. We conclude that the lack of allomorphy, that is, structural invariance, significantly adds to affixal salience and therefore enhances morphological decomposition. The implications of this finding for models of lexical processing are discussed.

The role of form and meaning in the processing of written morphology: A priming study in French developing readers

“…Among these factors, the likelihood of an affix occurring as a processing unit in a given language has been shown to be influenced by affixal salience (Laudanna & Burani, 1995). This salience depends both on the distributional (e.g., length, frequency) and linguistic (e.g., productivity, orthographic transparency, suffix allomorphy) (Järvikivi, Bertram, & Niemi, 2006) properties of morphemes. Additional experiments are needed in developing readers to examine the role of these factors in the development of morphemes as processing units.…”

Processing trade-offs in the reading of Dutch derived words

“…These dimensions include: orthographic properties of affixes (e.g., affix length, affixal confusability and transitional probabilities of ngrams near the morphemic boundary, e.g., Andrews & Davis (1999); Laudanna & Burani (1995)), their phonological and phonotactic properties (e.g., co-occurrence probabilities of n-phones and of discontinuous patterns across the morphemic boundary, e.g., Hay & Baayen, 2003), and their lexical properties (e.g., word formation type of the affix, existence of inflectional allomorphs or homonyms for the affix, cf. Baayen, 1994;Bertram et al, 2000c;Bertram, Laine, & Karvinen, 1999;Bertram, Laine, Baayen, Schreuder, & Hyönä, 2000b;Järvikivi, Bertram, & Niemi, 2006;Sereno & Jongman, 1997). Another important dimension of affixal salience is the distributional properties of affixes: words that embed affixes which occur in a larger number of different, frequent or new words tend to be processed faster.…”

Allomorphic responses in Serbian pseudo-nouns as a result of analogical learning

“…In Dutch, the diminutive suffix has two frequent allomorphic variations (-tje and -je), and three less frequent ones (-etje, -pje and -kje) (Daelemans et al 1997). In Finnish, allomorphy appears both in the stem (Järvikivi-Niemi 2002b) and in suffixes (Järvikivi et al 2006). Similarly, in Hungarian, allomorphic variations occur as stem shortening or lengthening (Pléh et al 2002), and as suffixal alternating vowels (Kertész 2003;Hayes-Cziráky Londe 2006).…”

“…Schreuder and Baayen (1995) stated that we may be slower in processing words with affixes that have several 67 allomorphs, than words containing affixes for which there is no allomorphic variation. Järvikivi et al (2006) made a similar, but more detailed claim, using the concept of affixal salience-"the probability with which an affix is likely to emerge from the orthographic/phonological string" (ibid., 395). They showed that affixal salience decreases as the number of affixal allomorphs increases.…”