Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Document Type
- Article (2)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Morphological processing (2) (remove)
Institute
- Department Linguistik (2) (remove)
We investigated the processing of morphologically complex words adopting an approach that goes beyond estimating average effects and allows testing predictions about variability in performance. We tested masked morphological priming effects with English derived ('printer') and inflected ('printed') forms priming their stems ('print') in non-native speakers, a population that is characterized by large variability. We modeled reaction times with a shifted-lognormal distribution using Bayesian distributional models, which allow assessing effects of experimental manipulations on both the mean of the response distribution ('mu') and its standard deviation ('sigma'). Our results show similar effects on mean response times for inflected and derived primes, but a difference between the two on the sigma of the distribution, with inflectional priming increasing response time variability to a significantly larger extent than derivational priming. This is in line with previous research on non-native processing, which shows more variable results across studies for the processing of inflected forms than for derived forms. More generally, our study shows that treating variability in performance as a direct object of investigation can crucially inform models of language processing, by disentangling effects which would otherwise be indistinguishable. We therefore emphasize the importance of looking beyond average performance and testing predictions on other parameters of the distribution rather than just its central tendency.
Many previous studies have shown that the human language processor is capable of rapidly integrating information from different sources during reading or listening. Yet, little is known about how this ability develops from child to adulthood. To gain insight into how children (in comparison to adults) handle different kinds of linguistic information during on-line language comprehension, the current study investigates a well-known morphological phenomenon that is subject to both structural and semantic constraints, the plurals-in-compounds effect, i.e. the dislike of plural (specifically regular plural) modifiers inside compounds (e.g. rats eater). We examined 96 seven-to-twelve-year-old children and a control group of 32 adults measuring their eye-gaze changes in response to compound-internal plural and singular forms. Our results indicate that children rely more upon structural properties of language (in the present case, morphological cues) early in development and that the ability to efficiently integrate information from multiple sources takes time for children to reach adult-like levels.