PSYC3311 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Affix, Lexical Decision Task, Morphological Derivation

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17 May 2018
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Week 6 lec 2
Polymorphemic words
- Suffixed derivational or inflectional
- Inflectional- less controversial. Dictionaries don’t even store these. Eg cat and cats.
Cos everything u know abt cats can be found by the function of stem (CAT) (i.e. that
it is a noun and its meaning) and function of suffix (S) (that it’s plural)
- So is it the case w our mental lexicon that we store only the word CAT
- So when we see CATS do we decompose words into their stem and affix?
- this is affix stripping. we do it in order to access the stem
Because everything one needs to know about an inflected word can usually be entirely based on
one's knowledge of its stem and suffix, dictionaries don't bother listing the inflected word. Does
the mental dictionary (i.e., lexicon) do the same thing? That is, when reading an inflected word, is
it always decomposed into its stem and affix (i.e., affix stripping), and recognised through
activation of its stem?
Support for morphological decomposition comes from lexical decision experiments that
manipulate base frequency (i.e., the frequency of the stem when used both by itself and in other
inflected words). For example, moons and cliffs have the same frequency of occurrence in the
language (= surface frequency (frequency of the words themselves)), but the frequency of moon
+ moons (High Base Freq) is greater than the frequency of cliff + cliffs (Low Base Freq). moons
has H base F. On finding that moons is easier to recognise than cliffs (e.g., Taft, 2004), it can be
concluded that the words are recognised via activation of a representation of their stem.
In addition to this base frequency effect, there is also a surface frequency effect (e.g., moons is
harder than boats, where the latter is a more common word than the former, but matched on base
frequency). Here we control BF and compare SF. Words matched on BF (moons and boats). So
frequency of moon + moons = frequency of boat+ boats. But moon is HF and boats is LF. Moons
> boats. So why is it faster if their stem is the same frequency?
Many have assumed that the surface frequency effect must indicate that the affixed word is stored
as a whole, and hence activated without decomposition. And in order to handle base frequency
effects as well, they support a dual pathways model whereby some words are recognised
through decomposition (BF effect) and others are recognised through the whole-word
representation (here SF effect) (e.g., Grainger & Ziegler, 2011; Schreuder & Baayen, 1995).
However, an obligatory decomposition model can still explain the surface frequency effect
without having to assume the existence of whole-word representations (Taft, 2004). Surface
frequency effects arise at a post-access recombination stage when the decision is made whether
the functional information associated with the stem combines with functional information
associated with the affix. E.g., it is hard to decide that moon can be plural compared to boat or
cliff, because the moon is almost always a single entity.
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Document Summary

Cos everything u know abt cats can be found by the function of stem (cat) (i. e. that it is a noun and its meaning) and function of suffix (s) (that it"s plural) So is it the case w our mental lexicon that we store only the word cat. This is affix stripping. we do it in order to access the stem. Because everything one needs to know about an inflected word can usually be entirely based on one"s knowledge of its stem and suffix, dictionaries don"t bother listing the inflected word. Support for morphological decomposition comes from lexical decision experiments that manipulate base frequency (i. e. , the frequency of the stem when used both by itself and in other inflected words). For example, moons and cliffs have the same frequency of occurrence in the language (= surface frequency (frequency of the words themselves)), but the frequency of moon.

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