PSY270H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Bound And Unbound Morphemes, Psycholinguistics, Phoneme
PSY270 Cognitive Psychology
Lecture 10.3 – Semantics
• Learning Objectives
o Explain the different types of morphemes
o Describe the effects of context on lexical access
o Describe Swinney’s famous study of the timing of context on lexical access
• Morphology
o A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in language
▪ e.g. “table” is a morpheme – can’t be broken be “tab” is but “le” isn’t
• table is the smallest unit with meaning
▪ “snowman” contains 2 morphemes – 2 parts that each have meaning
▪ Phoneme changes meaning but doesn’t carry meaning – morpheme changes
meaning
o Morphemes are not the same thing as words
o Types of morphemes
▪ Free morphemes have meaning on their own
• Stand on their own – words
▪ Bound morphemes contribute to word meaning, but aren’t words by
themselves
• Carry regular meaning on own but can’t be used in isolation – have to
be attached to words
• Prefixes and suffixes
▪ Ex. Quickly – “quick” is a word and “ly” is the bound morpheme
• Birds is 2 morpheme – bird is free morpheme but “s” is bound
• Semantics
o The meaning of words are stored in the mental lexicon
o The mental dictionary in LTM that stores words, their meanings, and relation to other
words
o Mental lexicon – where we store all the words we know and the relationship to other
words
▪ Ex. Use the word walk on its own but must use kiss in relation to others
o Psycholinguistics – focus on how we get words out of mental lexicon
o Lexical access depends on bottom-up and top-down processing
▪ People respond more quickly to high frequency words than low frequency
words – use of word affects how we access
▪ People notice errors better when they are in a predictable context
▪ People recognize letters better in context than in isolation – easier to recognize
K in the word work rather than on its own
o Phonemic restoration effect demonstrates that context can affect our perception of
language, not just comprehension
▪ Top-down effect
▪ Participants listen to sentences – one area where the sound was replaced with
the cough but they didn’t notice anything unusual with the sound
