Overtensing and the effect of regularity

Regularly inflected forms often behave differently in language production than irregular forms. These differences are often used to argue that irregular forms are listed in the lexicon but regular forms are produced by rule. Using an experimental speech production task with adults, it is shown that overtensing errors, where a tensed verb is used in place of an infinitive, predominantly involve irregular forms, but that the differences may be due to phonological confounds, not to regularity per se. Errors involve vowel‐changing irregular forms more than suffixing inflected forms, with at best a small difference between regular ‐ed and irregular ‐en. Frequency effects on overtensing errors require a model in which the past‐tense and base forms of the verb are in competition and in which activation functions are nonlinear, and rule out models with specialized subnetworks for past‐tense forms. Implications for theories of language production are discussed.     

Abstract morphemes and lexical representation: the CV-Skeleton in Arabic

Overlaps in form and meaning between morphologically related words have led to ambiguities in interpreting priming effects in studies of lexical organization. In Semitic languages like Arabic, however, linguistic analysis proposes that one of the three component morphemes of a surface word is the CV-Skeleton, an abstract prosodic unit coding the phonological shape of the surface word and its primary syntactic function, which has no surface phonetic content (McCarthy, J. J. (1981). A prosodic theory of non-concatenative morphology, Linguistic Inquiry, 12 373-418). The other two morphemes are proposed to be the vocalic melody, which conveys additional syntactic information, and the root, which defines meaning. In three experiments using masked, cross-modal, and auditory-auditory priming we examined the role of the vocalic melody and the CV-Skeleton as potential morphemic units in the processing and representation of Arabic words. Prime/target pairs sharing the vocalic melody but not the CV-Skeleton consistently failed to prime. In contrast, word pairs sharing only the CV-Skeleton primed reliably throughout, with the amount of priming being as large as that observed between word pattern pairs sharing both vocalic melody and CV-Skeleton. Priming between morphologically related words can be observed when there is no overlap either in meaning or in surface phonetic form.     

The role of derivational morphology in vocabulary acquisition: get by with a little help from my morpheme friends

This study explores the role of morphology in vocabulary knowledge of 3rd and 6th grade Finnish elementary school children. In a word definition task, children from both grades performed overall better on derived words than on monomorphemic words. However, the results were modified by the factors Frequency and Productivity. Most strikingly, performance on monomorphemic words was disproportionately weaker than on derived words at the low frequency range. At the high-frequency range, derived words with low-productive suffixes yielded poorest performance. We partly make an appeal to the lexical-statistical properties of the Finnish language to explain the interaction of Frequency and Word Structure. At any rate, the results suggest that Finnish elementary school children benefit significantly from utilizing morphology in determining word meanings.