Abstract
In French, regardless of stem regularity, inflectional verbal suffixes are extremely regular and paradigmatic. Considering the complexity of the French verbal system, we argue that all French verbs are polymorphemic forms that are decomposed during visual recognition independently of their stem regularity. We conducted a behavioral experiment in which we manipulated the surface and cumulative frequencies of verbal inflected forms and asked participants to perform a visual lexical decision task. We tested four types of verbs with respect to their stem variants: a. fully regular (parler “to speak,” [parl-]); b. phonological change e/E verbs with orthographic markers (répéter “to repeat,” [répét-] and [répèt-]); c. phonological change o/O verbs without orthographic markers (adorer “to adore,” [ador-] and [adOr-]); and d. idiosyncratic (boire “to drink,” [boi-] and [buv-]). For each type of verb, we contrasted four conditions, forms with high and low surface frequencies and forms with high and low cumulative frequencies. Our results showed a significant cumulative frequency effect for the fully regular and idiosyncratic verbs, indicating that different stems within idiosyncratic verbs (such as [boi-] and [buv-]) have distinct representations in the mental lexicon as different fully regular verbs. For the phonological change verbs, we found a significant cumulative frequency effect only when considering the two forms of the stem together ([répét-] and [répèt-]), suggesting that they share a single abstract and under specified phonological representation. Our results also revealed a significant surface frequency effect for all types of verbs, which may reflect the recombination of the stem lexical representation with the functional information of the suffixes. Overall, these results indicate that all inflected verbal forms in French are decomposed during visual recognition and that this process could be due to the regularities of the French inflectional verbal suffixes.
Highlights
Word and morpheme frequencies are directly related to the time spent for word recognition, with more frequent words being recognized faster than less frequent ones (Taft and Forster, 1975).The effects of the different frequencies of polymorphemic words are of great interest in the investigation of morphemic representations in the mental lexicon and morphological decomposition during word processing (Colé et al, 1989; Domínguez et al, 2000), especially in languages with rich and paradigmatic morphological systems
The first objective of the current work was to determine whether the systematic French verbal inflectional system underlies the morphological decomposition of all forms on visual recognition (Rastle and Davis, 2008) or whether inflected verbs can be accessed as whole words
The only one that reached significance was between word type and cumulative frequency [F(3, 293) = 8.238, p < 0.05]. This significant interaction effect will be further discussed by means of the different representations between regular and idiosyncratic verbs compared with phonological change verbs
Summary
The surface frequency effect, which reflects differences in word recognition as a function of form frequency, is one of the most reliable phenomena described in the psycholinguistic field in the last 35 years (Taft and Forster, 1975; Taft, 1979, 2004; Burani et al, 1984; Meunier and Segui, 1999b; Domínguez et al, 2000). Word and morpheme frequencies are directly related to the time spent for word recognition, with more frequent words being recognized faster than less frequent ones (Taft and Forster, 1975).The effects of the different frequencies of polymorphemic words are of great interest in the investigation of morphemic representations in the mental lexicon and morphological decomposition during word processing (Colé et al, 1989; Domínguez et al, 2000), especially in languages with rich and paradigmatic morphological systems. To other Romance languages (Oltra-Massuet, 1999; Domínguez et al, 2000; Say and Clahsen, 2002; Veríssimo and Clahsen, 2009), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience www.frontiersin.org
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