Semantic transparency and masked morphological priming: An ERP investigation

Author(s):  
Joanna A. Morris ◽  
Tiffany Frank ◽  
Jonathan Grainger ◽  
Phillip J. Holcomb
2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 1112-1124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Heyer ◽  
Dana Kornishova

Semantic transparency has been in the focus of psycholinguistic research for decades, with the controversy about the time course of the application of morpho-semantic information during the processing of morphologically complex words not yet resolved. This study reports two masked priming studies with English - ness and Russian - ost’ nominalisations, investigating how semantic transparency modulates native speakers’ morphological priming effects at short and long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In both languages, we found increased morphological priming for nominalisations at the transparent end of the scale (e.g. paleness – pale) in comparison to items at the opaque end of the scale (e.g. business – busy) but only at longer prime durations. The present findings are in line with models that posit an initial phase of morpho-orthographic (semantically blind) decomposition.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 895-908 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Diependaele ◽  
Dominiek Sandra ◽  
Jonathan Grainger

2007 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 506-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Morris ◽  
Tiffany Frank ◽  
Jonathan Grainger ◽  
Phillip J. Holcomb

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Wang ◽  
Marcus Taft

The present study investigates how morphological information is processed and represented in the bilingual lexicon. We employed a masked cross-language morphological priming paradigm to examine morphological decomposition and semantic transparency in bilingual lexical processing. A robust and reliable morphological priming effect was observed for both transparent compounds and opaque compounds, though there was a strong trend for more facilitation in the former than the latter. To account for these results, we propose a lemma-based bilingual model specifying the activation/competition between lemmas during cross-language activation at the morphological level. Our novel findings advance the understanding of interplay between morphology and bilingualism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tian Shen ◽  
R. Harald Baayen

Abstract In structuralist linguistics, compounds are argued not to constitute morphological categories, due to the absence of systematic form-meaning correspondences. This study investigates subsets of compounds for which systematic form-meaning correspondences are present: adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin. We show that there are substantial differences in the productivity of these compounds. One set of productivity measures (the count of types, the count of hapax legomena, and the estimated count of unseen types) reflect compounds’ profitability. By contrast, the category-conditioned degree of productivity is found to correlate with the internal semantic transparency of the words belonging to a morphological category. Greater semantic transparency, gauged by distributional semantics, predicts greater category-conditioned productivity. This dovetails well with the hypothesis that semantic transparency is a prerequisite for a word formation process to be productive.


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