Stem Homograph Inhibition and Stem Allomorphy: Representing and Processing Inflected Forms in a Multilevel Lexical System, 1999 & Morphological Parsing and the Perception of Lexical Identity: A Masked Priming Study of Stem Homographs, 2002 William Badecker and Mark Allen Presented by Nataliya Chabanyuk Instructor Nina Kazanina Psycholinguistics

Research question Two views are opposed: Decompositional, parsing: (novel words as unboyfriendable ) VS Whole word based access (frequent morphological complex words ) Any preference? Should the both work?

Research question When and where decompositional processes come into play in the comprehension system: Only for learning? Or, also For recognition and comprehension?

Background Evidences that morphological structure plays a role in the processing of complex words are compatible with both whole-word and decompositional models of representation. Inhibitory priming between stem homographs in Italian: colp-acolp-o ‘guilt’/’blow’ coll-o/pont-ecolp-o ‘neck/bridge’

Background Interpretation: Interpretation: inhibition reflects a competetive realtionship between stem representations rather than whole-word representations in the mental lexicon.BUT Perhaps the orthographic similarity alone can account for the inhibition that is observed in the stem homograph condition?

Terminology Processing/representational level: lemma VS lexeme Lexeme: Lexeme: form based lexical representation Lemma: Lemma: modality-neutral lexical represenation Lexemes goes & went have one lemme in common, probably go.

Experiment 1 & 2, 1999 To take stem homograph inhibition as evidence for morphological decomposition, it must be shown that the inhibition derives from stem-level competition and not just from word-level orthographic competition. Ex.2 shows that words that are orthographically related in the same way that stem homographs are will not inhibit each other in the same way or to the same degree that stem homographs do.

Experiment 1 & 2, 1999 Stem homograph: MOR-IA Orthographic relative: MORAL Stem homograph allomorph:MUER-E MOR-OS Orthographic related:MIR-AN Unrelated control:SILL-A Recognition of the plural noun mor-os (Moors) should be slowed not just by the verb form mor-ia(die, 1st/3rd person sing. Imperfect), but also by an allomorph of this form, muer- e(die, 3rd person sing, present)

Experiment 1 & 2, 1999 Participants: native speakers of Spanish Procedure: Fixation cross for 400 ms 50 ms after: Prime for 250 ms Immediately after: Target and remained present until the participant made a response

Experiment 1, 1999 Experiment 2, 1999

Discussion Competition may arise at another level within the lexical processing system: specifically, at a level of representation where all the members of an inflectional paradigm share a single (abstract) morphological entry. (M-level). AGAINSTResults go AGAINST the hypothesis that the stem homoghraph effect can be reduced to an orthographic phenomena.

Ex.1, 2002 Masked prime with subject awareness control Partcipants: Spanish native Procedure: ££££££££££££ for 500 ms Masked prime for 67 ms: 4 screen refresh ticks at ms Target for 500 ms Lexical desicion task ITI 1500 ms

Ex.1, 1999 & Ex. 1, 2002 masked unmasked To contrast masked stem homograph primes with unmasked stem homograph primes in the frame of the paersing model of inflectional processing.Prediction: Facilitative effect of masked stem homographs primes AGAINST AGAINST Inhibition effect of unmasked stem homograph prime

Unmasked prime from Ex.1, 1999 Masked prime from Ex.1, 2002

Discussion not Stem homographs are not just whole-word orthographic neibours. The facilitation indicates that ambiguous stems activate multiple affiliated lemmas prior to recognition. On the decomposition plus selection model we find facilitation, rather than inhibition or no effect, because suppression occurs only when lexical selection induces the conscious perception of a word as a particular word.

Ex.2 & ex. 3, 2002 To test hard-wired model against the parsing model: Inhibition Inhibition for masked stem homograph AGAINST allomorph in former case AGAINST nul-effect in the latter case. cierr-acerr-o close/hill rule out To rule out other potential reasons for the expected null effect: e.g. semantics and to verify the masked prime facilitates other members of their inflectionalm cohort cierr-acerr-ar

Experiment 2, 2002 Experiment 3, 2002

Ex. 4, 2002 To ensure that a masked stem homograph facilitates an allomorphic memebr of its competitor lemma’s paradigm and not just lexeme level entries that correspond to the exact orthographic form of the prime’s stem. cerr-ocierr-a facilitaiton derives from lemma-level sourcesSo, if masked RevSHA priming is facilitative, then we will have evidence that masked SH facilitaiton derives from lemma-level sources.

Experiment 3, 2002 Experiment 4, 2002

Experiment 1, 2002 Experiment 4, 2002

Discussion does not Lexical processing does not operate exclusively terms of whole-word in terms of whole-word recognition procedures For familiar words with ambiguous morphological constituents. Even if the access system supplementary whole-word has supplementary whole-word procedures for familiar targets, the facilitation and inhibition observed, respectively, in masked and unmasked stem-homograph priming indicates decomposition approach that the decomposition approach still contributes to the recognition process for these forms.

Conclusion O bligatory decomposition of complex words may be favored regardless of whole-word familiarity because it offers a way to extract the morpho- syntacticand conceptual information that is encoded separately in affixes and stems. Timing makes difference!