The time-course of morphological constraints

Abstract

The avoidance of regular but not irregular plurals inside compounds (e.g., *rats eater vs. mice eater) has been one of the most widely studied morphological phenomena in the psycholinguistics literature. To examine whether the constraints that are responsible for this contrast have any general significance beyond compounding, we investigated derived word forms containing regular and irregular plurals in two experiments. Experiment 1 was an offline acceptability judgment task, and Experiment 2 measured eye movements during reading derived words containing regular and irregular plurals and uninflected base nouns. The results from both experiments show that the constraint against regular plurals inside compounds generalizes to derived words. We argue that this constraint cannot be reduced to phonological properties, but is instead morphological in nature. The eye-movement data provide detailed information on the time-course of processing derived word forms indicating that early stages of processing are affected by a general constraint that disallows inflected words from feeding derivational processes, and that the more specific constraint against regular plurals comes in at a subsequent later stage of processing. We argue that these results are consistent with stage-based models of language processing.Morphological systems are constrained in how inflectional, derivational, and compounding processes may interact with each other. There is, for example, a general tendency for inflectional suffixes to attach outside derivational ones, which is captured by Greenberg's (1966, p. 93) Universal 28: 'If both the derivation and inflection follow the root, or they both precede the root, the derivation is always between the root and the inflection' . Thus in English, forms such as ducklings with the plural suffix appearing after the derivational suffix are grammatically well-formed but not forms with the reverse order (*ducksling).Linguists have analyzed the interaction between different morphological processes in terms of affix-specific selectional restrictions (see e.g., Fabb, 1988;Plag, 1996Plag, , 1999Plag, , 2002 and other kinds of more general constraints (of a semantic,

The recruitment of knowledge regarding plurality and compound formation during language comprehension

“…The latter effect suggests that the presence of pluralization on the first noun of the noun-noun string indeed led the processing mechanism away from a compound analysis of the noun-noun string in favor of a more complex, relative-clause analysis, despite both structural and non-structural biases favoring the compound analysis. These results are convergent with the eye-tracking findings of Cunnings and Clahsen (2007), showing a reading time slowdown immediately upon encountering a noun-noun string that violates the PIC constraint (see also Cunnings and Clahsen, 2008, regarding plurals in derived nominals). These results are also in line with a wide range production and acceptability judgment studies suggesting that regular plural compound non-heads are disfavored.…”

The time course of morphological processing in a second language

“…The specific linguistic phenomenon under study was derived words of English containing singular versus plural base nouns. Results from acceptability judgments with L1 speakers (Cunnings and Clahsen, 2008) showed that derived words containing singular base nouns (ratless) are preferred over those with plural ones and that amongst the latter, derived words with regular plurals as base nouns (ratsless) were rated significantly worse than those with irregular plurals (liceless). These contrasts can be explained in terms of two constraints (Cunnings and Clahsen, 2008).…”

“…Results from acceptability judgments with L1 speakers (Cunnings and Clahsen, 2008) showed that derived words containing singular base nouns (ratless) are preferred over those with plural ones and that amongst the latter, derived words with regular plurals as base nouns (ratsless) were rated significantly worse than those with irregular plurals (liceless). These contrasts can be explained in terms of two constraints (Cunnings and Clahsen, 2008). The first one attributes the preference for singular noun bases of derived words to a Category Constraint that restricts the kinds of morphological types that may enter derivational processes to stems.…”

Morphological variation in the speech of Frisian-Dutch bilinguals

“…Some morphological theories such as the level-ordering hypothesis (Kiparsky, 1982) and the words-and-rules theory (Berent & Pinker, 2007;Pinker, 1999) claim that regular plurals cannot be used as the left-hand member of compound formation; only irregular plurals can (Berent & Pinker, 2007;Cunnings & Clahsen, 2008;Kiparsky, 1982;Pinker, 1999). For instance, English compounds like mice eater show that irregular plural nouns are allowed as the first (or left) constituent of a nominal compound while examples like *rats eater show that regularly inflected plural nouns are usually not thus allowed.…”