The Effect of Family Size on Spanish Simple and Complex Words

Lázaro, Miguel; Sáinz, Javier

doi:10.1007/s10936-011-9186-y

Cited by 6 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Specifically, the higher the frequency of a suffix and the larger the family size of a suffix, the shorter the latencies. In accordance with our results, previous studies have also found facilitatory effects of suffix frequency (Baayen et al, 2007;Burani & Thornton, 2003; and suffix family size (Bertram, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2000;Lázaro & Sainz, 2012;. It is noteworthy that in our study in French, as in our parallel analyses in English , suffix frequency and suffix family size were highly associated.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

MorphoLex-FR: A derivational morphological database for 38,840 French words

et al. 2019

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Studies on morphological processing in French, as in other languages, have shown disparate results. We argue that a critical and long-overlooked factor that could underlie these diverging results is the methodological differences in the calculation of morphological variables across studies. To address the need for a common morphological database, we present MorphoLex-FR, a sizeable and freely available database with 12 variables for prefixes, roots, and suffixes for the 38,840 words of the French Lexicon Project. MorphoLex-FR constitutes a first step to render future studies addressing morphological processing in French comparable. The procedure we used for morphological segmentation and variable computation is effectively the same as that in MorphoLex, an English morphological database. This will allow for cross-linguistic comparisons of future studies in French and English that will contribute to our understanding of how morphologically complex words are processed. To validate these variables, we explored their influence on lexical decision latencies for morphologically complex nouns in a series of hierarchical regression models. The results indicated that only morphological variables related to the suffix explained lexical decision latencies. The frequency and family size of the suffix exerted facilitatory effects, whereas the percentage of more frequent words in the morphological family of the suffix was inhibitory. Our results are in line with previous studies conducted in French and in English. In conclusion, this database represents a valuable resource for studies on the effect of morphology in visual word processing in French. Keywords Morphology. Psycholinguistic variables. Lexical decision. Database. Visual word recognition. French Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language. This means that we can process and understand words that include more than one morpheme on the basis of their constituent morphemes, even if we have never encountered them before (Feldman, Milin, Cho, Moscoso del Prado Martín, & O'Connor, 2015). For example, when reading the invented word equalism for the first time we can recognize the form and meaning of its two morphemes: equal (its root) and-ism

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

MorphoLex-FR: A derivational morphological database for 38,840 French words

et al. 2019

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“…This series is carried out in Spanish, an interesting language given its extremely shallow orthography (in contrast to English and French) and its highly productive derivational system. Previous evidence in Spanish has shown an important role for suffixes in word recognition (Duñabeitia, Perea & Carreiras, 2008;Lázaro & Sainz, 2012;, but this evidence was not obtained in the context of pseudoword priming. With the overall existing evidence, assumptions about the role of morphology within this experimental paradigm cannot be straightforward because i) totally divergent results have been obtained in previous studies; ii) the previous studies were carried out in languages other than Spanish -with different morphological and orthographic features; and iii) other studies did not control for the WEF, a potentially confounding variable.…”

Section: Controlmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…Our results fail to show such well-documented effects and we believe the most reasonable explanation is related to the methodologies themselves. When suffixes and non-morphemic endings are presented as primes (dad-> igualdad; Duñabeitia et al, 2008;Lázaro & Sainz, 2012;Lázaro, Illera, & Sainz, 2015a), when complex stimuli are anticipated by unmasked primes (Lázaro, Illera, & Sainz, 2015b), or when complex words are presented as primes sharing or not the same suffixes as targets (brevedad -> igualdad; Duñabeitia et al, 2008), then the role of suffixes in morphological processing becomes evident. However, when complex words and complex and simple pseudowords are presented in a masked priming lexical decision, the role of suffixes and morphological decomposition seems to have no relevance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Priming effects in the recognition of simple and complex words and pseudowords

Lázaro

Illera

Sáinz

2018

Psicológica Journal

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Whether morphological processing of complex words occurs beyond orthographic processing is a matter of intense debate. In this study, morphological processing is examined by presenting complex words (brujería -> brujo –witchcraft -> witch), as well as simple (brujaña->brujo) and complex pseudowords (brujanza ->brujo), as primes in three masked lexical decision tasks. In the first experiment, the three experimental conditions facilitated word recognition in comparison to the control condition, but no differences emerged between them. Given the importance of the surface frequency effect observed, a second experiment was conducted. The results fully replicate those observed in the first one, but this time with low frequency targets. In the third experiment, vowels were removed from the stems of primes to reduce the orthographic overlap between primes and targets and, therefore, the influence of the embedded stem effect. The results show facilitative effects only for complex words. However, paired comparisons show no differences between experimental conditions. The overall results show the central role played by the processing of stems in visual word recognition and are explained in terms of current models of morphological processing.

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“…Evidently, the role of a grammatical morpheme can differ from that of a lexical morpheme when processing complex words, thus justifying the distinction between composition and derivation; (4) besides the above, the features of each particular language determine other areas of interest for the psycholinguistic study of reading. For example, Lázaro and Sainz () or Sainz, Sainz and Lázaro () underlined that while in Dutch and English, stem family size can be in the hundreds – probably due, to a certain extent, to their compositional richness – in the corpus of Spanish words in their study, no word had a family size above 15. Thus, each language has its own individual characteristics that diverge from those of other languages, despite the fact the languages might be related.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Perceptual salience of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition

Lázaro

Pérez

Martínez

2020

Scandinavian J Psychology

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L azaro, M., P erez, E.& Mart ınez, R. (2020). Perceptual salience of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 61,[348][349][350][351][352][353][354][355][356][357][358][359][360] This study analyzes the role of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition, tracking the eye movements of 31 participants in a sentence-reading task in Spanish. Perceptual salience of suffixes was operationalized as the proportion of letters represented by the suffixes with respect to the full words, that is, we relate the number of letters comprising the suffixes to the number of letters in the words in which they appear. The results reveal a significant role in first fixation duration of both word frequencythe more frequent the word, the shorter the fixations, and perceptual saliencethe more salient the suffix, the longer the fixations. Moreover, in gaze duration, our results show a main effect of word lengththe longer the word, the longer the fixations; word frequency; and significant interactions between word frequency and perceptual salience of suffixes on the one handthe effect of word frequency is only significant when perceptual salience of suffixes is high, and between word frequency and word length on the other handthe frequency effect decreases as word length increases. Overall results are interpreted in the light of the dual route models by which full-form and morphological processing interactively cooperate in visual word recognition.

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The Effect of Family Size on Spanish Simple and Complex Words

Cited by 6 publications

References 21 publications

MorphoLex-FR: A derivational morphological database for 38,840 French words

MorphoLex-FR: A derivational morphological database for 38,840 French words

Priming effects in the recognition of simple and complex words and pseudowords

Perceptual salience of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition

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