Monomorphemic Words Research Articles

Morphological decomposition compensates for imperfections in phonological decoding. Neural evidence from typical and dyslexic readers of an opaque orthography

The current study examined the widely held, but un-tested, assumption that morphological decomposition can compensate for missing phonological information in reading opaque orthographies. In addition, we tested whether morphological decomposition can compensate for the phonological decoding deficits in readers with dyslexia. Hebrew provides a unique opportunity to test these questions as it has a rich Semitic morphology, and two versions of script: a transparent orthography (with diacritic marks, ‘pointed’) and an opaque orthography (without diacritic marks, ‘un-pointed’). In two experiments, one behavioral and one fMRI, skilled and dyslexic readers read aloud Hebrew nouns: half bi-morphemic (root + pattern) and half mono-morphemic (non-decomposable). Each word was presented both in the transparent orthography (pointed), and in the opaque orthography (un-pointed). While skilled readers were faster, and showed no effects of diacritics or morphology, dyslexic readers read pointed words more slowly than un-pointed words and bi-morphemic words faster than mono-morphemic words. The imaging results showed: 1) In both groups a morphological effect was found in un-pointed words, in left inferior and middle frontal gyri, associated with morpho-phonological decomposition. 2) Only readers with dyslexia showed a morphological effect in pointed words in the left occipito-temporal cortex, associated with orthographic processing. 3) Dyslexic readers also showed a positive association between morphological awareness and activation in the left occipito-temporal cortex during reading of all words, and activation in inferior frontal cortex during reading of un-pointed bi-morphemic words. Altogether, these findings suggest that in both typical and dyslexic readers morphological decomposition can compensate for the missing phonological information in an opaque orthography. The results also show that readers with dyslexia can rely on morphological decomposition to compensate for their deficits in phonological decoding. Finally, these results highlight the way in which unique language specific properties shape the neural mechanisms underlying typical and atypical reading.

형태론적 오류 분석의 함의와 유의 중첩어의 출혈과 급여

There are three main ways to form a word such as derivation, compounding and blending. Paradoxically, knowledge of morphemes and morphological rules of languages is revealed by the morphological mistakes we make. Amsel Greene collected errors and published them in a book which is called Pullet Surprises. A monomorphemic word may be subject to morphological parsing in the hypothetical ‘pullet surprise’-type analysis. The objectives of this paper are three-fold. First, when a compound-type idiom is decomposed into more than one word in the ‘pullet surprise’-type analysis, its figurative meaning disappears, which shows that it should be listed as a single figurative meaning in the lexicon. Second, when a compound in which a synonym is reduplicated is combined with another word to form a new compound, it may be essential or should not be used. Finally, a hypothetical ‘pullet surprise’ analysis shows that the bleeding and feeding effects of synonymous word reduplication should be markedly recognized in the course of language acquisition.

Does the Morphological Structure of L1 Equivalents Influence the Processing of L2 Words? Evidence from Arabic-English Bilinguals

Objective. The current study aims at investigating if the morphological structure of the first language (L1) equivalents affects the processing of second language (L2) words.
 Materials & Methods. To this end, 400 Arabic-English bilinguals of two levels of language proficiency completed a free recall task and a discrete word association task in their L2. The stimuli represented cases of lexical matches and mismatches.
 Results. The results of the free recall task showed a facilitation effect for lexical matching in one comparison for the participants with lower proficiency while lexical matching led to an inhibitory effect in two comparisons for the participants with higher proficiency. Additionally, the participants with higher proficiency generally recalled more words than the participants with lower proficiency, and recalled monomorphemic words significantly differently than multi-morphemic words in one comparison. As for the results of the word association task, they failed to reveal significance for word type or language proficiency when association strength was considered. Only when the number of associations was considered, a facilitatory effect for lexical matching was observed in one comparison among the participants with lower proficiency. 
 Conclusions. The results generally support the claim that L2 learners exhibit sensitivity to the morphological structure of L1 words. The results also lend support to the interaction model of morphological processing and the bilingual lexicon models that highlight the influence of language proficiency on language processing.

Bottom-up probabilistic information in visual word recognition: interactions with phonological and morphological functions

This study investigates the role of probabilistic phonotactics in the processing of consonant clusters (as opposed to consonant-vowel sequences) and of complex words (as opposed to monomorphemic words) in two experiments of visual word recognition with masked fragment priming. Target words are more efficiently recognized when the transition probabilities between an initial fragment and the following segment in the target are high, but this effect is not equally distributed across all areas of the phonology. It was found that speakers rely more heavily on transition probabilities between segments of a consonant cluster than between segments of a consonant-vowel sequence. The morphemic integrity of the cluster is also a relevant parameter in predicting the role of probabilistic phonotactics in lexical access, with prefixed items showing a stronger facilitatory effect than pseudoprefixed items. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that phonotactic probabilities are relevant in visual word recognition, and that their effects interact with higher order linguistic information. These findings also enrich our view of the selection-and-competition mechanism that governs written word processing by providing direct evidence of the fact that the speakers anticipate the segment to the right based on implicit knowledge of phonotactic probabilities.

중국어 신어(新語)의 조어(造語) 형태에 대한 고찰 : 『現代漢語詞典(第7版)』의 신어를 중심으로

This study is about the neologism, which were newly included in Xiandai Hanyu cidian(7th edition)[Modern Chinese Dictionary]. It focuses on grasping the recent tendency of Mandarin new words by analyzing the ways of word-formation. The number of total data is 317, which can be classified into several types of words depending on the standards, such as syllable, part of speech, and combination of morphemes. According to the results of the study, various syllabic Mandarin words have been made from 2 syllables to 9 syllables, but still in Mandarin new words, disyllabic words have been formed most actively. Most of the new words are verbs and nouns. It is very interesting that many separable words, which are so called ‘liheci,’ appear in the data. Based on the ways of combing morphemes in words, the data can be divided into 5 types, such as mono-morphemic word, compound, derivative, abbreviation, and phrase. The most of the data are compounds and phrases, and they usually show modifying structures. It is interesting that there is no mono-syllabic word in the mono-morphemic words. Prefixes are used more often than suffixes in the derivatives. Various types of abbreviations such as acronym, blending, and clipping are shown in the data.

Word-final T-deletion in Southern German

The recordings of 20 native German speakers were analysed to identify the strongest factors affecting the rates of word-final t-deletion. Deletion rates were shown to be higher for /t/s in semiweak verbs, when preceded or followed by sibilants, and in a conversational speaking style. In addition to this, frequent words showed higher deletion rates. English and German t-deletion were comparable to some extent in this study. However, deletion rates by morphological complexity showed differences between the languages: monomorphemic words, in particular, had lower deletion rates in German than in English. It was also shown that reading aloud reduces the deletion rates significantly which is in line with previous research.

Lexical characteristics of written language input across primary grades: An analysis of a Dutch corpus based lexicon

The lexical written language input aimed at beginning readers may influence reading success. We analyzed a lexicon based on a corpus of Dutch reading materials for primary school children to gain insight into the frequency distribution of different word types, i.e. words with similar word characteristics, both per grade and across grades. The frequencies of monomorphemic, concrete words and of polysemous words remained relatively stable, whereas that of multimorphemic and monomorphemic abstract words increased across grades. Within each grade, multimorphemic and monomorphemic, abstract words had lower frequencies than monomorphemic, concrete words. Difficult polysemous words were less frequent than easy polysemous words in all grades. Some additional explorations on a larger word set corroborated our findings. Our findings suggest that authors of child reading materials adapt their choice of words to the intended vocabulary knowledge level, consistent with vocabulary knowledge development theories. We discuss theoretical and educational implications of our findings.

Evidence for Incomplete Neutralization in Chilean Spanish

Background/Aims: In Chilean Spanish, syllable- and word-final /s/ are frequently weakened to an [h]-like segment or completely deleted. In word-final position, /s/ serves as the plural morpheme, so its deletion renders a site for potential neutralization with singular items. Chilean scholars have previously described differences in the vowel preceding weakened or deleted /s/ distinguishing it from non-/s/-final words, but this putative incomplete neutralization has not yet been acoustically verified, nor have its conditioning factors been explored. The primary purpose of this study was to assess via phonetic analysis of spontaneous speech whether neutralization of final vowels in singular words and plural words in Chilean Spanish is indeed incomplete, as hypothesized by scholars during the 20th century. Additionally, these vowels were also compared to the vowels of monomorphemic /s/-final words in order to ensure that the attested singular-versus-plural differences were not simply indicative of closed syllable laxing processes. Methods: Vowels were extracted from the spontaneous speech of 20 Chilean Spanish speakers and acoustically analyzed via VoiceSauce. Results: The results revealed that final /a/ vowels of plural words were found to be breathier than singular vowels but less breathy than the final vowels of monomorphemic words, and that plural /o/ was significantly fronted. They also demonstrated increased breathiness on /e/ vowels closed by /s/, regardless of morphological status. Conclusion: These results provide the first account of incomplete neutralization of plural vowel correlates in spontaneous speech in Chilean Spanish, and they offer evidence for closed syllable processes in this particular dialect, in alignment with an exemplar-theoretic approach.

Analyzing the relationship and development of proficiency, derivational knowledge, and vocabulary size in Spanish L2 learners

Abstract One dimension of knowing a word is recognizing its structure. Previous research, mostly on L2 English, has revealed a close link between derivational knowledge (DK) and vocabulary size. Nevertheless, the degree of the relationship as well as the effect of the learner’s L1 vary among these studies. The present study analyzes the development of DK in L1 English learners of L2 Spanish (n = 209) taking university level courses from second to seventh semester at a US institution. The measurements explore the complex nature of DK – i.e., relational, syntactic and distributional knowledge – in both receptive and productive mode. Results showed that proficiency rather than vocabulary size, i.e., knowledge of monomorphemic words, contributes to DK. While a full receptive knowledge of some suffixes can be acquired relatively early, this is not the case for productive knowledge. This study also provides some tools to measure DK without resorting to metalanguage.

Effects of morphological complexity in left temporal cortex: An MEG study of reading Chinese disyllabic words

Abstract This study aims to evaluate effects of word-internal variables on reading disyllabic Chinese words by manipulating (a) morphological complexity, defined as the number of morphemes and (b) structural complexity, defined as whether the two syllables relate to each other via the specifier-head-complement structure. In a visual lexical decision task, magnetoencephalography (MEG) was recorded during the reading of four types of Chinese disyllabic words: (1), disyllabic-monomorphemic (e.g., 蚯蚓 “qiu yin” earthworms), used as the control condition; (2) coordinative compounds (such as 花草 “hua cao” flower-grass: plants), which are double-headed, with meanings jointly derived from the two roots; (3) modifier-head compounds (such as 汽車 “qi che” gas-car: an automobile), which are right-headed, with the first root as the modifier; and (4) verb-object compounds (such as 開車 “kai che” operate-car: to drive a car), in which the first and second roots express an action and an object respectively. Our source analysis indicated that, at 200 m s, reading compounds revealed larger activity in left anterior temporal cortex than reading monomorphemic words, which might reflect composition of morphologically complex words during processing. From 300 to 400 m s, reading modifier-head compounds and verb-object compounds revealed larger activity in the left posterior temporal cortex than reading monomorphemic words, but there was no significant difference between reading coordinative compounds and reading monomorphemic words in this time window. These results indicate that morphological complexity and structural complexity substantially modulate activities in left temporal cortex during the reading of disyllabic words.

Orthographic Transparency Enhances Morphological Segmentation in Children Reading Hebrew Words.

Morphological processing of derived words develops simultaneously with reading acquisition. However, the reader’s engagement in morphological segmentation may depend on the language morphological richness and orthographic transparency, and the readers’ reading skills. The current study tested the common idea that morphological segmentation is enhanced in non-transparent orthographies to compensate for the absence of phonological information. Hebrew’s rich morphology and the dual version of the Hebrew script (with and without diacritic marks) provides an opportunity to study the interaction of orthographic transparency and morphological segmentation on the development of reading skills in a within-language design. Hebrew speaking 2nd (N = 27) and 5th (N = 29) grade children read aloud 96 noun words. Half of the words were simple mono-morphemic words and half were bi-morphemic derivations composed of a productive root and a morphemic pattern. In each list half of the words were presented in the transparent version of the script (with diacritic marks), and half in the non-transparent version (without diacritic marks). Our results show that in both groups, derived bi-morphemic words were identified more accurately than mono-morphemic words, but only for the transparent, pointed, script. For the un-pointed script the reverse was found, namely, that bi-morphemic words were read less accurately than mono-morphemic words, especially in second grade. Second grade children also read mono-morphemic words faster than bi-morphemic words. Finally, correlations with a standardized measure of morphological awareness were found only for second grade children, and only in bi-morphemic words. These results, showing greater morphological effects in second grade compared to fifth grade children suggest that for children raised in a language with a rich morphology, common and easily segmented morphemic units may be more beneficial for younger compared to older readers. Moreover, in contrast to the common hypothesis, our results show that morphemic segmentation does not compensate for the missing phonological information in a non-transparent orthography, but rather that morphological segmentation is most beneficial in the highly transparent script. These results are consistent with the idea that morphological and phonological segmentation processes occur simultaneously and do not constitute alternative pathways to visual word recognition.

Morphological structure influences the initial landing position in words during reading Finnish.

The preferred viewing location in words [Rayner, K. (1979). Eye guidance in reading: Fixation locations within words. Perception, 8, 21-30] during reading is near the word centre. Parafoveal word length information is utilized to guide the eyes toward it. A recent study by Yan and colleagues [Yan, M., Zhou, W., Shu, H., Yusupu, R., Miao, D., Krügel, A., & Kliegl, R. (2014). Eye movements guided by morphological structure: Evidence from the Uighur language. Cognition, 132, 181-215] demonstrated that the word's morphological structure may also be used in saccadic targeting. The study was conducted in a morphologically rich language, Uighur. The present study aimed at replicating their main findings in another morphologically rich language, Finnish. Similarly to Yan et al., it was found that the initial fixation landed closer to the word beginning for morphologically complex than for monomorphemic words. Word frequency, saccade launch site, and word length were also found to influence the initial landing position. It is concluded that in addition to low-level factors (word length and saccade launch site), also higher level factors related to the word's morphological structure and frequency may be utilized in saccade programming during reading.

Compounds, phrases and clitics in connected speech

Abstract Four language production experiments examine how English speakers plan compound words during phonological encoding. The experiments tested production latencies in both delayed and online tasks for English noun-noun compounds (e.g., daytime), adjective-noun phrases (e.g., dark time), and monomorphemic words (e.g., denim). In delayed production, speech onset latencies reflect the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online production, speech latencies reflect the size of the first prosodic unit. Compounds are metrically similar to adjective-noun phrases as they contain two lexical and two prosodic words. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, native English speakers treated the compounds as single prosodic units, indistinguishable from simple words, with RT data statistically different than that of the adjective-noun phrases. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that compounds are also treated as single prosodic units in utterances containing clitics (e.g., dishcloths are clean) as they incorporate the verb into a single phonological word (i.e. dishcloths-are). Taken together, these results suggest that English compounds are planned as single recursive prosodic units. Our data require an adaptation of the classic model of phonological encoding to incorporate a distinction between lexical and postlexical prosodic processes, such that lexical boundaries have consequences for post-lexical phonological encoding.

Reading monomorphemic and compound words in Chinese

Abstract Two lexical decision experiments were conducted to study the recognition of two-character Chinese monomorphemic and compound words by adult native Chinese readers. In Experiment 1, the words appeared non-spaced, whereas in Experiment 2 a space was inserted between the two characters. An interaction between word type and spacing reflects a trend for spacing to slow down the recognition of monomorphemic words and speed up that of compound words. The word frequency effect was steeper for monomorphemic than compound words. The number of strokes in the first and the second character influenced the recognition time for compound words, but not for monomorphemic words. The results are interpreted in the light of the parallel dual route model of morphological processing. The holistic route is more prevalent in recognizing Chinese monomorphemic, while the morphological decomposition route is more prevalent in processing Chinese compound words.

<b>On the lexical stress patterns of Ilami Kurdish

This paper aims to investigate the stress patterns of Ilami Kurdish, a southern variety of Kurdish language, based on the criteria proposed by Kager (1995) and also Hayes (1995) regarding the stress patterns of human languages, including ‘boundedness’, ‘quantity sensitivity’, ‘word headedness’, ‘foot headedness’ and ‘directionality’. After analyzing Ilami Kurdish data and specifying the stress patterns of this dialect of Kurdish, we adopt Optimality Theory framework, which is a modern perspective towards phonology, to show how the optimal candidates are in conformity with the universal phonological constraints in Ilami dialect. All in all, it can be said that Ilami is a right-bounded quantity-sensitive variety as far as monomorphemic words are considered.The next part of the research is devoted to the study of the stress pattern of compound words in Ilami Kurdish. In order to evaluate the stress pattern of these constructions, we use PRAAT software program to analyze the data collected from native speakers of Ilami. Concerning the stress pattern of compounds, it was observed that this is always the rightmost syllable of the final morpheme that bears the strong stress, regardless of the length of word and the number of morphemes. Actually, this tendency always violates the main-left (C) universal constraint according to which a clitic group (c) is left- headed.

Syllables and morphemes in German reading development: Evidence from second graders, fourth graders, and adults

ABSTRACTChildren have been found to use units such as syllables and morphemes in fine-grained reading processes, before they transition to a coarse-grained, holistic route. Which units they prefer at different stages in reading development is unresolved. The present study compares the use of syllables and morphemes. Second graders, fourth graders, and adults performed a lexical decision task on multimorphemic and monomorphemic words and pseudowords that were visually disrupted either syllable-congruent or syllable-incongruent (i.e., morpheme-congruent in multimorphemic items). Syllables turned out to be the preferred unit of fine-grained processing for second graders, while fourth graders also used morphemes when morphemes were emphasized by the presentation format. Moreover, the study supports the assumption that children rely more on fine-grained processing, while adults have more coarse-grained processing.

Gradual or abrupt? The phonetic path to morphologisation

While some sound changes occur in environments defined in purely phonological terms, others may become sensitive to morphological boundaries. In this paper, we investigate the phonetic nature of this latter diachronic development: does it happen through small gradient increments, or is there a categorical shift from one allophone to another? We focus on goose-fronting and /l/-darkening in Southern British English, the interaction of which is sensitive to morphological boundaries. Relatively retracted realisations of the vowel and dark realisations of the /l/ appear before a morpheme boundary, even when a vowel follows (e.g. fool-ing), whereas in monomorphemic words (e.g. hula), there is more /uː/-fronting, and the /l/ is relatively lighter. We analyse the phonetic realisation of such pairs as hula vs. fool-ing in 20 speakers of Southern British English using both acoustic and articulatory (ultrasound) instrumental methods. All the speakers express the morphological contrast in some way, although effect sizes vary dramatically. For some speakers, the contrast involves subtle articulatory differences without any clear acoustic consequences, whereas other speakers show robust differences employing multiple phonetic correlates. We therefore argue that the hula~fool-ing contrast would be misrepresented if analysed in terms of a small number of either /uː/ or /l/ allophonic categories. Instead, we interpret the results as supporting the predictions of phonological frameworks that incorporate phonetically-gradient morphologisation.

Not Everybody Sees the Ness in the Darkness: Individual Differences in Masked Suffix Priming.

The present study explores the role of individual differences in polymorphemic word recognition. Participants completed a masked priming lexical decision experiment on suffixed words in which targets could be preceded by suffix-related words (words sharing the same suffix) or by affixed primes with a different suffix. Participants also completed a monomorphemic word lexical decision and were divided in two groups (fast and slow readers) according to their performance in this task. When the suffix priming data were analyzed taking into consideration participants' reading speed as a proxy for their greater reliance on orthography or on semantics, a significant interaction between reading speed and the magnitude of the masked suffix priming effects emerged. Only slow participants showed significant priming effects, whereas faster participants showed negligible masked suffix priming effects. These results demonstrate that different reading profiles modulate the access to morphological information in a qualitatively different manner and that individual differences in reading determine the manner in which polymorphemic words are processed.

Stress Pattern System in Central Sarawani Balochi

The present article investigates the stress pattern system of Central Sarawani Balochi (CSB), spoken in Sarawan located in Sistan and Baluchestan province of the Islamic Republic of Iran, based on metrical theory as developed in Hayes (1995). Correspondingly, the present research illustrates the position of primary and secondary stress in mono-morphemic words, verbal paradigms, compound words, complex words, pair words and simple transitive as well as intransitive sentences. The linguistic data are mostly based on the purposeful recording of speech gathered through interview and elicitation from the speech of 10 male and female language consultants with different social backgrounds. CSB data highlight that the stress pattern system in this language variety is almost totally systematic; it is a language variety with iambic feet. Further, CSB data show up that stress is culminative at phonological level. It is also rhythmically distributed. The absence of stress assimilation is supported by CSB data as well. Since the location of stress is predictable, its stress pattern is fixed. The data, likewise, confirm that stress system in CSB is a mixture of morphological and rhythmic. Meanwhile, stress pattern in complex words indicate the suffixes attract the primary stress. Besides, in negative and prohibitive forms, prefixes m{- and n{- get the primary stress.

Inflected words in production: Evidence for a morphologically rich lexicon.

Current evidence suggests that there is a difference between the representations of multimorphemic words in production and perception. In perception, it is widely believed that both whole-word and root representations exist, while in production there is little evidence for whole-word representations. The present investigation demonstrates that whole-word and root frequency independently predict the duration of words suffixed with -ing, -ed, and -s, which reveals that both root and word representations play a role in the production of inflected English words. In a second line of analysis, we find that the number of inflected phonological neighbours independently predicts the duration of monomorphemic words, which extends these results and suggests that whole-word representations exist at the lexical level. Together these results suggest that both root and word representations of inflected words are stored in the lexicon and are relevant for the production of both monomorphemic and multimorphemic words.