Li8 Li8 Structure of EnglishStructure of English

Evidence for morphological structure

MorphologyMorphology

“Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Mankind. Basically, it’s made up of two separate words - ‘mank’ and ‘ind.’ What do these words mean? It’s a mystery, and that’s why so is mankind.”

Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

MorphemesMorphemes

Morphology is the study of morphemes and their behavior. A morpheme is the minimal unit of meaning. dogs contains 2 morphemes:

1 ‘quadruped of the genus canis’2 - ‘plural’

Note: morphemes words A word is the smallest element that can occur in isolation.

New singulars New morphemes Psycholinguistic evidence

Rule-governed behaviorPriming studiesEvent Related PotentialsSpeech errorsDisorders

Evidence for morphological Evidence for morphological decomposition and storagedecomposition and storage

New singularsNew singulars indice, homo sapien

New morphemesNew morphemes

-a/oholic -burger -gate:

Watergate, Fornigate

-head: pothead, metalhead, techhead,

gearhead, theoryhead, crackhead, hockey head

Mc-: McMansion, mcjob, mcnews

It's true, I'm a Rageaholic...I just can't live without Rageahol!

McDonald's not lovin' McDonald's not lovin' McJobMcJob dictionary definition dictionary definitionCHICAGO, Illinois (AP, 11-2003) -- McDonald's says it deserves a break from the unflattering way the latest Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary depicts its job opportunities. Among some 10,000 new additions to an updated version released in June was the term "McJob," defined as "low paying and dead-end work." In an open letter to Merriam-Webster, McDonald's CEO Jim Cantalupo said the term is "an inaccurate description of restaurant employment" and "a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women" who work in the restaurant industry. The company e-mailed the letter to media organizations Friday, and it also was published in the Nov. 3 edition of an industry trade publication. Cantalupo also wrote that "more than 1,000 of the men and women who own and operate McDonald's restaurants today got their start by serving customers behind the counter.“ McDonald's, the world's largest restaurant chain, has more than 30,000 restaurants and more than 400,000 employees. Walt Riker, a spokesman for McDonald's, said the Oak Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant also is concerned that "McJob" closely resembles McJOBS, the company's training program for mentally and physically challenged people. "McJOBS is trademarked and we've notified them that legally that's an issue for us as well," Riker said.

McJob () n. A low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.Source: Merriam-Webster Online

Psycholinguistic Psycholinguistic evidenceevidence

Over-regularizationOver-regularization

went went goed goed went went Happens c. late twos Suggests acquisition of morphological

rules

Wug testsWug tests Berko 1958 3 surface manifestations of English regular plural /-z/: [z], [s],

[əz] When/how do children learn these rules? Test paradigm

Children are presented with a pretend creature and told, "This is a wug."

Another wug is revealed, and the researcher says, "Now there are two of them. There are two __."

Results Very young children are baffled by the question and are unable to

answer correctly, responding with e.g. “two wug." Children in grade 1 were almost fully competent with both [s] and

[z]. Both preschool and first-grade children dealt poorly with [əz],

giving the correct answer less than half the time, possibly because it occurs in the most restrictive context.

Major finding The first experimental proof that young children have extracted

generalizable morphological rules from the language around them.

Productive irregularsProductive irregulars Al Jallad, Flint, and Richardson 2005 Subjects come up with past tense for unfamiliar V.

1. Jim BLINGS everyday. Yesterday John __________________.

2. Alan CHINES everyday. Yesterday Alan __________________.

Subjects in the experiment 26 children: age 6-7 (oral test) 44 adults (written questionnaire)

Sample Over-Irregularizations children

pake pakeded bling blung, blang flink flunk frim frand

adults mang mung shride shrude bling blank morget morgot tind tind

Overall Rate of Irregular forms supplied

Individual Differences in Irregularization: bars show percentages of subjects making 0-20% irregulars, 20-40% irregulars etc.

ERPsERPs McKinnon et al. 2003. Observation

Pronounceable non-words (flermuf) elicit larger-amplitude N400 components than words (muffler).

Prediction If readers treat non-words containing non-

productive morphemes (in-ceive) as unanalysed wholes, then these non-words should elicit larger N400s than matched words (receive).

Results Bound-stem non-words elicit a brain response

highly similar to that elicited by real words. Conclusion

Morphological decomposition and representation extend to non-productive morphemes.

Broth:Brothel:BrotherBroth:Brothel:Brother Rastle et al. 2004

Participants made visual lexical decisions to stem targets preceded by masked primes sharing

(a) a semantically-transparent morphological relationship with the target (e.g., cleaner-CLEAN);

(b) an apparent morphological relationship, but no semantic relationship, with the target (e.g., corner-CORN);

(c) a non-morphological form relationship with the target (e.g., brothel-BROTH).

Results showed significant and equivalent masked priming effects in cases in which primes and targets appeared to be morphologically related, and priming in these conditions could be distinguished from non-morphological form priming.

These findings suggest a level of representation at which apparently complex words are decomposed based on their morpho-orthographic properties.

Morphological Morphological speech errorsspeech errors

Morphological errorsMorphological errors

– Morpheme exchange– slicely thinned

– Feature shift– have to went for had to go

– Faulty access– have teachen for have taught– concludement for conclusion

– Experimentally controlled morphological errors…

Janssen and Humphreys 2002Janssen and Humphreys 2002 General logic:

If a string of phonemes with an identifiable meaning can move independently during a speech error, it is a production unit, with a separate, independent representation at some cognitive level.

Inflectional morphemes (e.g. -ed, -ing, -s) are much more error prone than derivational morphemes (e.g. -er, -ness, -able, -ion) (Garrett 1980, Humphreys, 2002).

Can we also find experimental speech error evidence of derivational decomposition?

Prediction: If derivational morphemes are stored independently from their stems,

more morphological speech errors should occur when -er is a real morpheme than when it is only a pseudo-morpheme.

English derivational -er

cpv adj nice+er

agentive work+er

pseudo-morph summer

MethodMethod elicited morphological errors from speakers by presenting a series of word

quads, made up of two pairs. Speakers read these words silently, after which they disappeared. Speakers were occasionally cued to respond aloud, as quickly as possible, to the immediately preceding item. Speakers had to then either repeat the previous phrases exactly, or had to swap words between the phrases. The critical pairs each consisted of an initial ller word plus a critical word stem or stem+affix.

ResultsResults

More affix errors occurred on the morphologically complex forms than on the pseudo-morphs.

Conclusion: derivational affixes are also stored as separate morphemes.

Morphological Morphological disordersdisorders

Lexical disorderLexical disorder Badecker 2001

CSS (65 years old) suffered a left cerebro-vascular accident in 1990, resulting in lexical impairments manifested in reading, repetition, and oral and written naming tasks.

Apart from word-finding problems, CSS’s spoken output is fluent and he exhibits no apparent comprehension impairment.

picture naming

“butterfly”

naming from

definitionSlender-bodied

insect with broad, often brightly-colored wings.

“butterfly”

monomorphemes: 80% correct

doctor flysunwheel pill

polymorphemes: 50% correct!

Semantic disordersSemantic disorders

“Deep dyslexia” = semantic errors during reading

Buchanan et al. 2003 Deep dyslexic patient (JO, 48, L temporo-

parietal lobectomy) Acquired reading disorder characterized by production of:

morphological errors (e.g., SLEEP read as SLEEPING) semantic errors (e.g. HEART read as BLOOD)

ExperimentExperiment Method

Manipulate transparency in compound word naming study Results

94 stimuli 10 read correctly; 9 of these were TT Transparent components read correctly more often Key point: if there were no decomposition, all compound types should show the

same error rate Response to PANCAKE:

cake, breakfast, man,. . .cake, man. . .cake, mancake, man, man, p-, p-, cake, birthday, breakfast, cake, p-a-n. . . cake, syrup...

Typical semantic error: [target] cake [output] birthday (shows decomposition) NB 2nd and last attempts are semantic associate for the whole compound

(BREAKFAST, SYRUP) Shows successful access of meaning of the compound, even though she never manages to say

the whole thing

Conclusion JO can successfully parse compound into constituents and access meaning of

the whole; the errors occur after this point

-T -O

T- DOORMAN SHOEHORN

O- POTHOLE DEADLINE

Deep dyslexiaDeep dyslexia Rastle et al. 2005

Observation: Deep dyslexics often make morphological errors in reading aloud e.g. sexist read as sexy

Two competing explanations:1. representations are morphologically structured2. low imageability/frequency word modified to visually similar word of

higher imageability/frequency) (Funnell 1987) Prediction:

Theory 1 predicts more stem errors with morphologically complex words (killer) than with pseudosuffixed words (corner) and monomorphemic words (cornea) when one equalizes for imageability and frequency.

Theory 2 predicts no difference between these 3 categories. Result:

Theory 1 (but not Theory 2) supported

Regular vs. irregularRegular vs. irregular Ullman et al. 1997, Ullman 2001 propose that:

the left inferior frontal cortex (along with the basal ganglia) is involved in rule-based computations

Irregular forms dealt with differently Prediction:

A lesion to this region should impair only regular morphological processes, sparing the ability to produce irregular morphology.

Test: Four types of patients: Parkinsons, Alzheimers, anterior aphasics, and posterior aphasics Patients were asked to perform a sentence completion task requiring the production of a verb

in the past tense E.g. “Every day I dig a hole. Just like every day, yesterday I ____ a hole”

Results: anterior aphasics and Parkinson patients performed worse with regular than irregular verbs the opposite for posterior aphasics and Alzheimer patients

Conclusion: Results consistent with theory that the left frontal cortex and basal ganglia are involved in

rule-based language processing but not in the processing of irregular morphology, and that temporal lobe areas are implicated in the storage of lexical forms.

But…

Regular vs. irregularRegular vs. irregular Problem with Ullman’s theory

Agrammatic (Broca’s) aphasics who perform worse on irregular than regular morphological transformations (producing irregular V forms) patient RC (Shapiro & Caramazza 2003) patient MR (Laiacona & Caramazza 2004) Spanish-Catalan bilinguals (Caramazza et al. 2004)

Consistent with the classical view that left inferior frontal cortex is involved in morphosyntactic processing and not just in rule-based transformations.

ConclusionsConclusions Humans decompose words into morphemes

and store them as such. Both regular and irregular/restricted

morphology involve rule-governed (de)composition.blang, inceive, Broca’s aphasics

Humans look for morphological structure even when there isn’t any.cheeseburger, corner

ReferencesReferencesAndrews, S. 1986. Morphological influences on lexical access: Lexical or nonlexical effects? Journal of Memory

and Language, 25, 726-740.Andrews, S., B. Miller, & K. Rayner. 2004. Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words:

There is a mouse in mousetrap. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 16:285-311.Badecker, William. 2001. Lexical composition and the production of compounds: evidence from errors in naming.

Language and Cognitive Processes 16.4.Buchanan, Lori, Shannon McEwen, Chris Westbury, and Gary Libben. 2003. Semantics and semantic errors:

Implicit access to semantic information from words and nonwords in deep dyslexia. Brain and Language 84:65–83.

Caramazza, Alfonso, Alessandro Laudanna, and Cristina Romani. 1988. Lexical access and inflectional morphology. Cognition 28.

Fiorentino, Robert. 2006. Masked priming of compound constituents: Implications for morphological decomposition. Manuscript, University of Maryland.

Janssen, Dirk and Karin Humphreys. 2002. Morphological speech errors on agentive and comparative affixes. Third International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Banff, Canada.

McKinnon, R., M. Allen, & L. Osterhout. 2003.  Morphological decomposition involving non-productive morphemes: ERP Evidence. Neuroreport 14:883-886.

Marslen-Wilson et al. 1994. Psychol Rev 101:3-33.Rastle, Kathleen, Matthew Davis, and Boris New. 2004. The Broth in my Brother’s Brothel: Morpho-Orthographic

Segmentation in Visual Word Recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11.6:1090-1098.Rastle, Kathleen, et al. 2005. New evidence for morphological errors in deep dyslexia. Brain and Language

97:189-199.Shapiro, K., & Alfonso Caramazza. 2003. Looming a loom: Evidence for independent access to grammatical and

phonological properties in verb retrieval. Journal of Neurolinguistics 16:85-111.