Complex words consist of morphemic subunits that can recombine to form other words. Thus midnight is standardly analyzed as consisting of the prefix mid- and stem night, which also occur in words such as midstream and nightly. A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. We investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic, phonological, and orthographic codes. Five cross-modal lexical decision experiments show that the magnitude of priming (e.g., for pairs such as teacher-teach) is affected by the degree of semantic and phonological overlap between words. Crucially, items that are only moderately similar produce intermediate facilitation effects (e.g., latelylate) . This pattern is observed both for words standardly treated as morphologically related (e.g., teacher-teach) and for morphologically unrelated words that exhibit similar degrees of semantic and phonological overlap (e.g., snarl-sneer). The results can be understood in terms of connectionist models employing distributed representations rather than discrete morphemes. Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: Evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology One of the fundamental problems in the study of language is to characterize knowledge of words and how this knowledge is used in comprehension and production. The focus of the present article is on derivational morphology, the aspect of lexical knowledge concerning the structure and formation of complex words. Words such as baker and talking appear to consist of components, traditionally called m...

This research studied the role of surface and cumulative word frequency in the processing and representation of morphologically complex suffixed words. Experiment 1 showed that auditory lexical decision times to suffixed words were influenced by their surface frequency. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a cumulative root frequency effect for high- and low-surface-frequency suffixed words. Experiment 4 demonstrated that lexical decision times for these words varied as a function of their position in their morphological family. These results support a view whereby suffixed words belonging to a given morphological family share the same lexical entry. Within a lexical entry, suffixed words belonging to the same family are organized on the basis of their surface frequency and compete with one another. © 1999 Academic Press Key Words: morphology; lexical decision task; suffixed words. The word-frequency effect is one of the most robust findings in the field of visual word recognition. Indeed, the frequency with which a word occurs in printed language is a consistent predictor of performance in a variety of tasks used to study visual word recognition. In an early study, Howes and Solmon (1951) showed that the visual recognition threshold for tachistoscopically presented words is a function of the logarithm of their frequency. Subsequently, this correlation has been observed in a large variety of experimental tasks such as tachistocopic report

In reading research, morphological processing and monomorphemic word identification have generally been treated separately. We describe a computational model that brings both kinds of reading together within a single framework. This model assumes that word knowledge—the orthography, phonology, and meaning of words—accumulates with experiences with individual words and that this knowledge is reflected in two functionally different aspects of word processing—familiarity and availability. We report simulations that demonstrate that the model accounts both for classical effects of frequency and consistency in simple word reading and for morphological effects in the reading of complex words. The morphology simulations naturally capture a distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology without defining this distinction a priori. We discuss the implications of our model for general issues in reading, including individual differences in reading ability.

Lexical co-occurrence counts from large corpora have been used to construct highdimensional vector-space models of language.. Distances between word vectors extracted from these models are generally considered to reflect semantic similarity. Implicit in this assumption is that `semantic distance' measurements correspond to human intuitions. This paper investigates the validity of one such measure, contextual similarity, calculated from the spoken part of the British National Corpus. In Experiment 1, a moderate correlation is found between human judgements of the semantic similarity between pairs of nouns and the model's measure of contextual similarity. The correlation between the two measures is confirmed in two additional experiments, using a new set of elicited ratings. The semantic similarity of same-category word pairs (Experiment 2A) and the similarity between words differing in syntactic category (Experiment 2B) is found to be predictable from contextual similarity. The results...

The focus of the study is two-fold: 1) to determine how much phonemic material must be considered in predicting nominal gender in Spanish; 2) to determine if gender assignment can be considered an analogical process. A database of Spanish nouns extracted from a frequency dictionary serves as the database for the present study, while the phonemic make up and syllable structure of the penultimate rime and final syllable serve as the variables. A number of analogical simulations using the Analogical Modeling of Language algorithm demonstrate that phonemic material from as far back as the penultimate rime may aid in gender assignment. Analogy is also shown to closely mirror Spanish speakers ’ intuitions regarding the gender of unknown words. Gender assignment errors made by children also fall out of the analogical architecture. 1. INTRODUCTION Previous studies of Spanish gender fall into one of three major categories: 1) In the pedagogical approach (e.g. Bergen, 1978; Bull 1965; Teschner & Russell, 1984), the emphasis is placed on dividing Spanish nouns into masculine and feminine groups based mainly on their final phonemes, and listing the most common

In the present paper, I contrast empirical and non-empirical approaches to linguistics by examining the extent to which they practice the scientific method. I provide examples of linguistic analyses that follow and depart from the scientific method and argue that valid explanations about actual language processing rely on adherence to scientific methodology. However, this is not a requirement for philosophical arguments about abstract language structure. Charges of pseudoscience arise when empirical significance is attached to analyses that fail to follow the scientific method. Progress in linguistics is only made to the extent that researchers adopt the method that is standard in scientific endeavors.

fMRI evidence from derivational suffixation

Language www.elsevier.com/locate/jml Morphological decomposition and semantic integration in word processing q

www.elsevier.com/locate/jml Morphological decomposition in early visual word processing �

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