Asymmetric Morphological Priming Among Inflected and Derived Verbs and Nouns in Greek.

Sofia Loui,Athanassios Protopapas,Eleni Orfanidou

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.658189

Abstract

The present study examined differences between inflectional and derivational morphology using Greek nouns and verbs with masked priming (with both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony) and long-lag priming. A lexical decision task to inflected noun and verb targets was used to test whether their processing is differentially facilitated by prior presentation of their stem in words of the same grammatical class (inflectional morphology) or of a different grammatical class (derivational morphology). Differences in semantics, syntactic information, and morphological complexity between inflected and derived word pairs (both nouns and verbs) were minimized by unusually tight control of stimuli as permitted by Greek morphology. Results showed that morphological relations affected processing of morphologically complex Greek words (nouns and verbs) across prime durations (50–250ms) as well as when items intervened between primes and targets. In two of the four experiments (Experiments 1 and 3), inflectionally related primes produced significantly greater effects than derivationally related primes suggesting differences in processing inflectional versus derivational morphological relations, which may disappear when processing is less dependent on semantic effects (Experiment 4). Priming effects differed for verb vs. noun targets with long SOA priming (Experiment 3), consistent with processing differences between complex words of different grammatical class (nouns and verbs) when semantic effects are maximized. Taken together, results demonstrate that inflectional and derivational relations differentially affect processing complex words of different grammatical class (nouns and verbs). This finding indicates that distinctions of morphological relation (inflectional vs. derivational) are not of the same kind as distinctions of grammatical class (nouns vs. verbs). Asymmetric differences among inflected and derived verbs and nouns seem to depend on semantic effects and/or processing demands modulating priming effects very early in lexical processing of morphologically complex written words, consistent with models of lexical processing positing early access to morphological structure and early influence of semantics.

Highlights

A considerable body of research on the nature of lexical representation and processing suggests that words are represented and stored in memory in terms of their morphological constituents
Greek is more balanced in this respect compared to other highly inflected languages in the literature, such as Hebrew (1:14; Deutsch et al, 1998) and Italian. These features of Greek morphology minimize the risk of differences between inflection and derivation processes, or between the processing of nouns and verbs, that might be attributed to differences in semantic or syntactic information, or to differences in morphological complexity
The fact that priming effects differed between different types of morphological relations but not between complex words of different grammatical class suggests that the distinctions of morphological relation and grammatical class are not manifestations of a single underlying categorical distinction

Summary

Introduction

A considerable body of research on the nature of lexical representation and processing suggests that words are represented and stored in memory in terms of their morphological constituents (play-er, play-ing, dis-play). These constituents are used in processes of language production (Levelt et al, 1999) and comprehension (e.g., Feldman and Andjelkovic, 1992; Marslen-Wilson et al, 1994; Sandra and Taft, 1994), such that all complex words are composed of their constituent morphemes during word production and decomposed into them during comprehension Evidence for this morpheme-based representation view comes from studies, suggesting that morphemic structure influences lexical processing of written words: lexical processing times are facilitated by frequency of root (Colé et al, 1989; Baayen et al, 1997; Alegre and Gordon, 1999), by frequency of suffix (though marginally; English: Juhasz et al, 2003; Italian: Burani D. et al, 1997; Burani A. et al, 2006; Burani and Thornton, 2003), and by prior presentation of a morphologically related word (e.g., player-PLAY; Forster et al, 1987; Grainger et al, 1991; Marslen-Wilson et al, 1994; Frost et al, 1997; Rastle et al, 2000; Crepaldi et al, 2010). Base morphemes of inflected forms (e.g., play in play-s) may be represented and processed differently from derived forms (e.g., play in player) because different levels of morphological representation are processed at different times during lexical processing: inflectional suffixes are believed to be processed before derivational ones (Laudanna et al, 1992)

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