Predicting inflectional morphology from context

Limits on lexical prediction during reading

“…In sum, the present results are consistent with previous research (Dikker et al, 2009(Dikker et al, , 2010Luke & Christianson, 2015;Roland et al, 2012;Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2013) in providing evidence that the language processing system could make less-detailed, or graded, predictions that do not specify the full word form. Such predictions could include information about part of speech, morphosyntax, and semantics, and may occur even if the actual identity of the word is not predictable from context.…”

“…Research has suggested that highly constraining sentences permit the generation of highly specific predictions that include http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2016.06.002 0010-0285/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. not just semantic content (Federmeier & Kutas, 1999;Federmeier, McLennan, Ochoa, & Kutas, 2002), but also morphosyntax (Luke & Christianson, 2015;Otten, Nieuwland, & Van Berkum, 2007;Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003), phonology (DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005), orthography (Laszlo & Federmeier, 2009), letter position (Luke & Christianson, 2012), and visual features of objects, such as shape (Rommers, Meyer, Praamstra, & Huettig, 2013). Predictions generated from spoken language guide eye movements when looking at images (Altmann & Kamide, 1999Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003;Staub, Abbott, & Bogartz, 2012).…”

“…Dikker and colleagues (Dikker, Rabagliati, Farmer, & Pylkkänen, 2010;Dikker, Rabagliati, & Pylkkänen, 2009) showed that the language processing system detects syntactic violations (e.g., a noun is encountered when a verb is expected) at an extremely early stage, and argue that this may be because word class is predicted by the processor. Luke and Christianson (2015) provide evidence that the morphological structure of English verbs (e.g., the presence of a suffix) can also be predicted from syntactic context even when the verb itself is not predictable. Taken together, these studies suggest that, consistent with graded prediction, other information besides the identity of an upcoming word is predictable from context, even when that context is not constraining enough to permit prediction of a particular word.…”

Do morphemes matter when reading compound words with transposed letters? Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials

“…This corroborates findings from the ERP literature that readers predict even the orthography of expected words in highly constraining sentences (Laszlo & Federmeier, 2009), and, therefore, that a TL prime that violates this orthographic prediction does not facilitate reading times. Other work from Luke and Christianson (2013, 2015) using this paradigm has found reduced or absent cross-morpheme TL priming in inflected English past-tense verbs, an effect that is modulated by both the frequency profile of the inflected words (Luke & Christianson, 2013) as well as the predictability of the inflectional morpheme (Luke & Christianson, 2015). Thus, these two studies provide evidence in favor of morphological decomposition during reading in a sentence context, at least within inflected words under certain circumstances.…”

“…Thus, overtly presented transposed letter nonwords elicit longer reading times relative to correctly spelled words, with the magnitude of this increase indexing the amount of increased difficulty in recognition caused by the particular misspelling. However, many of these studies did not manipulate the placement of transposed letters relative to morpheme boundaries (cf., Luke & Christianson, 2013, 2015), and none have done so in English compound words. As such, the question of whether between-morpheme TLs will elicit longer reading times than within-morpheme TLs in English compound words remains unanswered and will be addressed in the current investigation.…”