Abstract
This paper deals with the impact of the salience of complex words and their constituent parts on lexical access. While almost 40 years of psycholinguistic studies have focused on the relevance of morphological structure for word recognition, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between the word as a whole unit and its constituent morphemes. Depending on the theoretical approach adopted, complex words have been seen either in the light of their paradigmatic environment (i.e., from a paradigmatic view), or in terms of their internal structure (i.e., from a syntagmatic view). These two competing views have strongly determined the choice of experimental factors manipulated in studies on morphological processing (mainly different lexical frequencies, word/non-word structure, and morphological family size). Moreover, work on various kinds of more or less segmentable items (from genuinely morphologically complex words like hunter to words exhibiting only a surface morphological structure like corner and irregular forms like thieves) has given rise to two competing hypotheses on the cognitive role of morphology. The first hypothesis claims that morphology organizes whole words into morphological families and series, while the second sets morphology at a pre-lexical level, with morphemes standing as access units to the mental lexicon. The present paper examines more deeply the notion of morphological salience and its implications for theories and models of morphological processing.
Highlights
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
The idea of morphological salience refers to the relative importance or prominence of a morpheme in a morphologically complex word, the underlying assumption being that the salience of morphological components drives the mechanisms underlying complex word processing as well as storage and lexical organization
Competitors send positive activation to their respective base lexemes, which send positive activation back to them. According to this account, exemplified in the supralexical model of Giraudo and Grainger (2000), complex words are not “decomposed” following the procedure described by the sublexical/decompositional account, but are able to trigger the activation of their constituent morphemes. Both sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing integrate a morphological level of processing, they differ with respect to the location of morphological units within the architecture of the mental lexicon, as well as the content of these units, both of which properties define their role of such units in word processing
Summary
The semiotic notion of salience has been applied to inflectional and derivational morphology from the 1980s onward, mainly in the framework of ‘Natural Morphology’ (NM; e.g., Dressler et al, 1987). According to this account, exemplified in the supralexical model of Giraudo and Grainger (2000), complex words are not “decomposed” following the procedure described by the sublexical/decompositional account, but are able to trigger the activation of their constituent morphemes Both sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing integrate a morphological level of processing, they differ with respect to the location of morphological units within the architecture of the mental lexicon, as well as the content of these units, both of which properties define their role of such units in word processing. In our view, observing sensitivity to the internal structure of complex words can be interpreted as reflecting a central role of morphemes in lexical access, but the factors influencing lexical access (e.g., lexical frequency) are likely to be different from those organizing the mental lexicon properly (e.g., morphological family size)
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