A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: The case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew
Authors: Martin FMD, Bertram R, Haikio T, Schreuder R, Baayen RH
Publisher: AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
Publication year: 2004
Journal: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Journal name in source: JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION
Journal acronym: J EXP PSYCHOL LEARN
Volume: 30
Issue: 6
First page : 1271
Last page: 1278
Number of pages: 8
ISSN: 0278-7393
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.30.6.1271(external)
Abstract
Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.
Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.
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