Whole-word Frequency Research Articles

What Is a Word? Recognizing Polymorphemic Lexical Items in DLI

This paper addresses issues of frequency and transparency in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in Developmentally Language Impaired (DLI) francophones. A simple visual lexical decision task probes responses of DLI and control participants when presented with verbs. DLI participants are sensitive to whole-word frequency and show little or no transparency effects. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to “morphological families” in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency. These facts support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure.

Is There a Dual System for Regular Inflections?

A central question in morphological research is whether there are whole-word representations for regularly inflected forms. A series of four lexical decision experiments addressed this question by looking at whole-word frequency effects across a range of frequency values with constant stem-cluster frequencies. Frequency effects were only found for inflected forms above a threshold of about 6 per million, whereas such effects were found for morphologically simple controls in all frequency ranges. We discuss these data in the context of two kinds of dual models and in relation to competition models proposed within the connectionist literature.

Frequency Effects and the Representational Status of Regular Inflections

There have been many recent proposals concerning the nature of representations for inflectional morphology. One set of proposals addresses the question of whether there is decomposition of morphological structure in lexical access, whether complex forms are accessed as whole words, or if there is a competition between these two access modes. Another set of proposals addresses the question of whether inflected forms are generated by rule-based systems by connectionist type associative networks or if there is a dual system dissociating rule-based regular inflections from association-based irregular inflections. A central question is whether there are whole-word representations for regularly inflected forms. A series of five lexical decision experiments addressed this question by looking at whole-word frequency effects across a range of frequency values with constant stem-cluster frequencies. Frequency effects were only found for inflected forms above a threshold of about 6 per million, whereas such effects were found for morphologically simple controls in all frequency ranges. We discuss these data in the context of two kinds of dual models and in relation to competition models proposed within the connectionist literature.

Representation and processing of derived words

Abstract Two visual, lexical decision experiments with Italian derived words are reported. The issue addressed was whether or not derived words with highly productive derivational suffixes (-zione, -mento, -tore, etc.) that do not alter the orthographic/phonological characteristics of the base form, are processed/represented in a morphologically decomposed form. Experimentally, the issue investigated was whether it is the frequency of the root-morpheme of the word, the frequency of the whole word, or both that determines decision latencies and errors. Results indicate that there is an effect of both root frequency and whole-word frequency on lexical decision performance and errors to derived words. This result is interpreted within the framework of the Augmented Addressed Morphology Model of lexical access.