Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical processing.

Abstract

This paper reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2500 polymorpemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision, while readers' eye-movements were registered. We found evidence that both full-forms of compounds (dishwasher) and their constituent morphemes (e.g., dish, washer, er) and morphological families of constituents (sets of compounds with a shared constituent) played a role in compound processing. We observed simultaneous effects of compound frequency, left constituent frequency and family size early (i.e., before the whole compound has been scanned), and also effects of right constituent frequency and family size that emerged after the compound frequency effect. The temporal order of these and other effects that we observed goes against assumptions of many models of lexical processing. We propose specifications for a new multiple route model of polymorphemic compound processing, which is based on time-locked, parallel and interactive use of all morphological cues, as soon as they become (even partly) available to the visual uptake system. Keywords: morphological structure; lexical processing; eye movements; compounds 2 Current models of morphological processing and representation in reading have explored a wide range of logically possible architectures. Sublexical models hold that complex words undergo obligatory parsing and that lexical access proceeds via their morphemes (cf., Taft, 1991;Taft & Forster, 1975, 1976. Supralexical models, by contrast, argue that morphemes are accessed only after the compound as a whole has been recognized (e.g., Diependaele, Sandra & Grainger, 2005;Giraudo & Grainger, 2001). Dual route models hypothesize that full-form based processing goes hand in hand with decompositional processing. The two access routes are usually assumed to be independent (Allen & Badecker, 2002;Baayen & Schreuder, 1999;Frauenfelder & Schreuder, 1992;Laudanna & Burani, 1995;Schreuder & Baayen, 1995), although an interactive dual route model has been proposed as well . In connectionist models such as the triangle model (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), morphological effects are interpreted as arising due to the convergence of orthographic, phonological and semantic codes. What all these theories have in common is that they were developed to explain data obtained with chronometric measures for isolated reading of bimorphemic complex words. As a consequence, they tend to remain silent about the time-course of information uptake in the reading of complex words.Establishing the temporal order of activation of full-forms (e.g., dishwasher) of complex words and of their morphological constituents (e.g., dish and washer) is critical for adjudicating between competing models of morphological processing. The present study addresses the time-course of morphological processing by considering the reading of long, polymorphemic Dutch compounds. Importantly, current models of morphological processing offer different 3 predictions with regard to the visual recognition of such compo...

Probability and surprisal in auditory comprehension of morphologically complex words

“…This means that the present experiment and the auditory lexical decision experiment of Balling and Baayen (2008) are consistent in showing an interaction between whole-word and second constituent frequency. Similar interactions between whole-word and constituent frequencies are reported by Kuperman et al (2009) and Kuperman, Bertram, and Baayen (2010).…”

“…While in visual lexical decision and reading, a greater family size leads to shorter response latencies and shorter fixation durations (De Jong, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2000;Kuperman, Schreuder, Bertram, & Baayen, 2009), in auditory lexical decision onset-aligned family members sharing the first (but not the second) morpheme have an inhibitory effect. It is only those family members that are fully consistent with all bottom-up information at word offset, the continuation forms, that show the facilitation familiar from the reading literature.…”

Seeing a phrase “time and again” matters: The role of phrasal frequency in the processing of multiword sequences.

“…A number of studies have looked at the processing of compounds and their constituents using an eye-tracking paradigm (Kuperman, Bertram, & Baayen, 2008;Kuperman, Schreuder, Bertram, & Baayen, 2009). Such research has found evidence for parallel access to full forms (blackboard) and their constituents (black and board).…”

Limits on the extension of affixal combination: structural restrictions and processing conditions

“…Recent proposals based on experiments provide evidence of the inadequacy of sublexical and supralexical models, as well as dual-route models designed as a 'horse race', as demonstrated by Pollatsek et al (2008). Kuperman et al (2008Kuperman et al ( , 2009Kuperman et al ( , 2010 proposed a multiple-route model as an alternative. According to these authors (2010: 94), the model considers the mental lexicon as a "long-term memory storage for lexical information".…”

“…Baayen (2007); Kuperman et al (2009) ;Kuperman, et al (2010)). Although a direct route is most efficient for the processing of high-frequency complex words (e.g.…”