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Institute
Two opposing viewpoints have been advanced to account for morphological productivity, one according to which some knowledge is couched in the form of operations over variables, and another in which morphological generalization is primarily determined by similarity. We investigated this controversy by examining the generalization of Portuguese verb stems, which fall into one of three conjugation classes. In Study 1, an elicited production task revealed that the generalization of 2nd and 3rd conjugation stems is influenced by the degree of phonological similarity between novel roots and existing verbs, whereas the 1st conjugation generalizes beyond similarity. In Study 2, we directly contrasted two distinct computational implementations of conjugation class assignment in how well they matched the human data: a similarity-driven model that captures phonological similarities, and a dual-mechanism model that implements an explicit distinction between context-free and similarity-based generalizations. The similarity-driven model consistently underestimated 1st conjugation responses and overestimated proportions of 2nd and 3rd conjugation responses, especially for novel verbs that are highly similar to existing verbs of those classes. In contrast, the expected proportions produced by the dual-mechanism model were statistically indistinguishable from human responses. We conclude that both context-free and context-sensitive processes determine the generalization of conjugations in Portuguese, and that similarity-based algorithms of morphological acquisition are insufficient to exhibit default-like generalization. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Morphological systems are constrained in how they interact with each other. One case that has been widely studied in the psycholinguistic literature is the avoidance of plurals inside compounds (e.g. *rats eater vs. rat eater) in English and other languages, the so-called plurals-in-compounds effect. Several previous studies have shown that both adult and child speakers are sensitive to this contrast, but the question of whether semantic, morphological, or surface-form constraints are responsible for the plurals-in-compounds effect remains controversial. The present study provides new empirical evidence from adult and child English to resolve this controversy. Graded linguistic judgments were obtained from 96 children (age range: 7;06 to 12;08) and 32 adults. In the task, participants were asked to rate compounds containing different kinds of singular or plural modifiers. The results indicated that both children and adults disliked regular plurals inside compounds, whereas irregular plurals were rated as marginal and singulars as fully acceptable. Furthermore, acceptability ratings were found not to be affected by the phonological surface form of a compound-internal modifier. We conclude that semantic and morphological (rather than surface-form) constraints are responsible for the plurals-in-compounds effect, in both children and adults.
Masked priming research with late (non-native) bilinguals has reported facilitation effects following morphologically derived prime words (scanner - scan). However, unlike for native speakers, there are suggestions that purely orthographic prime-target overlap (scandal - scan) also produces priming in non-native visual word recognition. Our study directly compares orthographically related and derived prime-target pairs. While native readers showed morphological but not formal overlap priming, the two prime types yielded the same magnitudes of facilitation for non-natives. We argue that early word recognition processes in a non-native language are more influenced by surface-form properties than in one's native language.