Abstract
We tested the hypothesis that lexical-semantic access of inflected words is governed by the word stem. Object drawings overlaid with a dot/arrow marking position/movement were matched with corresponding linguistic expressions like “from the house”. To test whether the stem dominates lexical-semantic access irrespective of its position, we used Swedish prepositional phrases (locative information via preposition immediately preceding the stem) or Finnish case-inflected words (locative information via suffix immediately following the stem). Both in monolingual Swedish and in bilingual Finnish-Swedish speakers, correct stems with incorrect prepositions/case-endings were hardest to reject. This finding supports the view that the stem is indeed the dominant unit in meaning access of inflected words.
Highlights
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in language
Psycholinguistic models of morphological processing vary with respect to the emphasis they place on morphemic units in word recognition and production, and the level of processing at which these units may come into play (e.g., [1,2,3,4,5,6,7])
This finding suggests that the results of Laine [22] with locative case markers are not confounded by the position of the suffix in the morphologically complex word
Summary
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in language. With a relatively small number of morphemic elements it is possible to create large numbers of complex words that bear systematic mappings between form and meaning. In the Finnish language, lexical decision experiments [4,8,9,10], eye-movement registrations [11] as well as data from patients with acquired aphasia [12,13] have shown that most inflected nouns elicit a processing cost (e.g., longer reaction times or fixations, higher error rates) when compared to matched monomorphemic nouns. This robust effect has been taken as evidence that the majority of Finnish inflected words are decomposed into a stem and a suffix during recognition. Behavioral and brain imaging studies investigating the functional locus of the processing cost related to Finnish inflections have shown that this cost primarily stems from the later semantic-syntactic level [14,15,16,17], i.e., the access and integration of the meaning of the stem and suffix of the inflected word
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