Morphological decomposition in Bantu
- African languages have rarely been the subject of psycholinguistic experimentation. The current study employs a masked visual priming experiment to investigate morphological processing in a Bantu language, Setswana. Our study takes advantage of the rich system of prefixes in Bantu languages, which offers the opportunity of testing morphological priming effects from prefixed inflected words and directly comparing them to priming effects from prefixed derived words on the same targets. We found significant priming effects of similar magnitude for both prefixed inflected and derived word forms, which were clearly dissociable from prime-target relatedness in both meaning and (orthographic) form. These findings provide support for a (possibly universal) mechanism of morphological decomposition applied during early visual word recognition that segments both (prefixed) inflected and derived word forms into their morphological constituents.
Author details: | Laura Anna CiaccioORCiDGND, Naledi KgoloORCiD, Harald ClahsenORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2020.1722847 |
ISSN: | 2327-3798 |
ISSN: | 2327-3801 |
Title of parent work (English): | Language, cognition and neuroscience |
Subtitle (English): | a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation |
Publisher: | Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group |
Place of publishing: | Abingdon |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2020/02/09 |
Publication year: | 2020 |
Release date: | 2023/03/16 |
Tag: | African; affix stripping; inflection; languages; prefixes; visual word recognition |
Volume: | 35 |
Issue: | 10 |
Number of pages: | 15 |
First page: | 1257 |
Last Page: | 1271 |
Funding institution: | Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship award; Research Focus "Cognitive; Sciences" of the University of Potsdam; Research Fund of the Faculty of; Humanities, University of Botswana |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Hybrid Open-Access |
License (German): | CC-BY-NC-ND - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International |