The Salience of Complex Words and Their Parts: Which Comes First?

Abstract

This paper deals with the impact of the salience of complex words and their constituent parts on lexical access. While almost 40 years of psycholinguistic studies have focused on the relevance of morphological structure for word recognition, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between the word as a whole unit and its constituent morphemes. Depending on the theoretical approach adopted, complex words have been seen either in the light of their paradigmatic environment (i.e., from a paradigmatic view), or in terms of their internal structure (i.e., from a syntagmatic view). These two competing views have strongly determined the choice of experimental factors manipulated in studies on morphological processing (mainly different lexical frequencies, word/non-word structure, and morphological family size). Moreover, work on various kinds of more or less segmentable items (from genuinely morphologically complex words like hunter to words exhibiting only a surface morphological structure like corner and irregular forms like thieves) has given rise to two competing hypotheses on the cognitive role of morphology. The first hypothesis claims that morphology organizes whole words into morphological families and series, while the second sets morphology at a pre-lexical level, with morphemes standing as access units to the mental lexicon. The present paper examines more deeply the notion of morphological salience and its implications for theories and models of morphological processing.

A magyar morfológia elsajátításának kezdetei

“…A felnőtt beszélők képesek korábban soha nem hallott toldalékolt szóalakokat létrehozni és megérteni. Hogy ezt pontosan milyen mechanizmusok teszik lehetővé, az részben még ma, több mint 4 évtizednyi kutatás után is vitatott (Sandra-Taft 1994;Giraudo-Dal Maso 2016;Leminen et al 2016). A vita részleteit itt nincs mód bemutatni, csak a legfontosabb elméleti álláspontokra térünk ki.…”

Word and beyond-word issues in morphological processing

“…In other words, within a mental lexicon dealing every day with novelty, productivity and lexical creation, able to attribute a (probably temporary) lexical status to an item such as banara, showing no morphological complexity, there is no a priori reason to exclude word-like items (e.g. sportation, buyed) from the realm of possible words, especially given the morphological pseudo-complexity of these words and the salience of their base/affixes (Giraudo and Dal Maso 2016b), which can possibly trigger orthographic bottom-up processing effects. This is especially true for lexical decision experiments where the participant has to make a quick decision on the lexicality of the stimuli presented in the middle of the screen.…”

Perceptual salience of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition

“…Perceptual salience is not univocally operationalized in research on morphology and lexical access. Salience initially refers to formal aspects, such as the length of suffixes measured in graphemes or phonemes, but it can also relate to semantic aspects (Giraudo & dal Maso, ). Other forms of operationalizing salience exist, such as through homonymy, (Bertram, Laine, Baayen, Schreuder & Hyönä, ) or orthographic confusability (Laudanna & Burani, ).…”