Gonia Jarema

Processing compounds: A cross-linguistic study.

This study explores the role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness in the on-line visual recognition of French and Bulgarian compounds using a constituent repetition priming paradigm. The results reported show significant constituent priming effects for both languages. Moreover, distinct priming patterns emerged, demonstrating that the semantic transparency of individual constituents, their position in the string, and morphological headedness interact in the processing of compounds.

The representation and processing of compound words

1. Why Study Compound Processing? An Overview of the Issues 2. Compound Types 3. Compound Representation and Processing 4. The Neuropsychology of Compound Words 5. Preschool Childrens Acquisition of Compounds 6. Doghouse/Chien-maison/Niche: Compounds in Bilinguals 7. Conceptual Combination: Implictions for the Mental Lexicon 8. Processing Chinese Compounds: A Survey of the Literature References Index

A morphological processing deficit in verbs but not in nouns: A case study in a highly inflected language

Abstract In this paper we describe a non-fluent aphasic patient who presents a selective impairment in the inflectional morphology of verbs but not of nouns in a highly inflected language, Greek. Furthermore, the patients impairment was observed in production, but not in comprehension. More specifically, the patient manifested a selective deficit in the production of past-tense forms that do not involve computation of the rule-based aspectual marker. The patients deficit pattern indicates that morphological processes have to be considered in relation to grammatical class in models of lexical processing.

Why Is “Red Cross” Different from “Yellow Cross”?: A Neuropsychological Study of Noun–Adjective Agreement within Italian Compounds☆

This study investigates the performance of two Italian nonfluent aphasic patients on noun-adjective agreement in compounds and in noun phrases. A completion, a reading, and a repetition task were administered. Results show that both patients were able to correctly inflect adjectives within compounds, but not in noun phrases. Moreover, they were sensitive to constituent order (noun-adjective vs adjective-noun) within noun phrases, but less so within compounds. These results suggest differential processing for compounds as compared to noun phrases: While the latter require standard morphosyntactic operations that are often impaired in aphasic patients, the former can be accessed as whole words at the lexical level.

Lexical reading in Spanish: Two cases of phonological dyslexia

The way spoken language is represented by orthographic structure is thought to influence the cognitive reading mechanism for a language, and therefore language breakdown patterns should reflect this. The present article focuses on two patients, both monolingual native Spanish speakers, who were able to read words but showed great difficulty in reading nonwords. This finding could be attributed to the fact that these patients were reading globally using a lexical route. This pattern of reading behavior is known as phonological dyslexia. It has been argued that lexical reading is not an option for Spanish readers since its orthography is highly regular. Our findings contradict this hypothesis and support the view that cognitive reading mechanisms are universal.

Regularity revisited: evidence from lexical access of verbs and nouns in Greek.

The present study investigates the relationship between morphological regularity and form during lexical processing using a visual priming paradigm varying the prime duration. We addressed the effect of regularity on morphological facilitation in nouns and verbs by exploiting particular characteristics of a highly inflected language, Greek, in which it is possible to manipulate morphological regularity while controlling the degree of orthographic overlap between morphological relatives. The effects of morphological regularity were found to crucially depend on the time course of lexical access. Moreover, morphological regularity was found to affect nouns and verbs differentially. We interpret these findings with respect to the distinction between affix processing and allomorph retrieval and discuss the issues of form overlap and orthographic boundaries in morphological processing.

The processing of interfixed German compounds

This postulate by Goethe (*1749), the first protagonist of a new discipline of morphology (albeit first only within biology), confronts us with the main problem of processing studies of morphology: Are morphological constructions processed as wholes or with regard to their parts or, if both, under which conditions? This question has been of central concern in the psycholinguistic literature on lexical processing over the past quarter century. The debate in this area was initiated by the provocative claim put forward by Taft and Forster (1975; 1976) that multimorphemic words are represented in the mental lexicon in terms of their constituents and that multimorphemic word recognition routinely involves a morphological decomposition procedure. Subsequent experimentation, however, has pointed to the view that neither this strong position nor the strong contrary position advocated by Butterworth (1983) accounts for the performance of language users across languages, task types, and stimulus categories (see McQueen and Cutler (1998) for a recent review). Even within individual categories of morphological construction, experimental results have led to a rather complex view of the role of morphology in lexical processing. Compound word processing, for example, has been shown to provide evidence for both whole word representation and constituent activation. In general, semantically transparent compounds show constituent activation, whereas semantically opaque compounds show greater evidence of whole word activation (Libben 1998; Sandra 1990; Zwitserlood 1994). Recent work by Libben, Derwing and de Almeida (1999) has also suggested that the processing of compounds may involve the creation of multiple representations that are simultaneously computed and evaluated. Libben et al. (1999) claim that the processing of compounds is not guided by a principle of parsing efficiency but rather by a mechanism that uncovers the maximum number of morphemes within a multimorphemic string.

Impairment of inflectional morphology and lexical storage

The present study investigates the repetition, comprehension, and production abilities of three French-speaking agrammatic aphasics on stimuli that require attention to the inflectional markers of number, gender, and tense. Two sets of experiments were conducted within a Strong Lexicalist framework. The results suggest that morphological deficits can manifest themselves at distinct levels of grammar, the lexical and the postlexical. The internal morphological structure and idiosyncracies of lexical items were found to have an effect on aphasic performance. A proposal of a differentially organized lexical storage reflecting the particularities of the French verbal system is put forth. The storage hypothesis suggested for verbs is extended to other lexical items.

Two Different Dysgraphic Syndromes in a Regular Orthography, Spanish☆

In opaque orthographies, such as English and French, three central dysgraphic syndromes have been described: surface dysgraphia, phonological dysgraphia, and deep dysgraphia. Writing breakdown patterns reveal that spelling can proceed by phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, or by a more direct or lexical approach. Ardila et al. (1989, 1991) claim that for Spanish speakers a lexical strategy for reading and writing is not an option due to the regularity of the orthography of this language. In this study we report two clear cases of dysgraphia in Spanish, one of surface dysgraphia and another of phonological dysgraphia, where a dissociation between lexical and sublexical writing can be observed, thus contradicting Ardilas position.

The processing of compounds in bilingual aphasia: A multiple‐case study

Background: While converging evidence has led to the view that people with aphasia exploit compositional procedures when producing compound words, the issue of what compound‐internal characteristics are at play during these procedures is still under debate. It has been argued that constituent position and/or morphosyntactic prominence, i.e., being the head constituent of a compound, may influence the manner in which compounds are accessed. However, findings obtained from patient performances are thus far inconclusive, because positional and headedness effects are frequently confounded in a language. Aims: In order to disentangle position‐in‐the‐string and headedness effects in compound production in aphasia, the main objective of this study is to investigate the performance of bilingual patients speaking languages in which these effects can be teased apart. Our secondary goal is to probe the roles of grammatical category (adjectives vs nouns) and of between‐language phonological similarity, as both these factors have been demonstrated to influence compound processing. Methods & Procedures: Three English–French bilingual persons with aphasia participated in the study. Three experimental tasks, reading, repetition, and translation of isolated compound words, were administrated in each language. We contrasted French and English compounds that differ in the position of the head constituent: left for French and right for English. Outcomes & Results: Two participants showed a similar pattern—a significantly reduced number of errors for the head (or first) constituent as compared to the non‐head (or second) constituent in French and an equivalent number of errors for both constituents in English—pointing to the cumulative effects of headedness and first‐position‐in‐the‐string in French, and to the mutual cancelling out of these effects in English. The third participant exhibited a non‐head constituent advantage in both languages, indicating that semantic modification of the head constituent by the non‐head constituent plays a prominent role in her accessing procedures. For all three participants phonological similarity influenced production, while grammatical category did not. Conclusions: Our results reveal that headedness and position interact in the processing of compounds. They also demonstrate that compound constituents are processed asymmetrically across and within languages, thus confirming that people with aphasia are sensitive to compound‐internal structure. Moreover, they show that patients rely on varying structural information when accessing compounds.