Matthew John Pastizzo

The processing and representation of Dutch and English compounds: Peripheral morphological, and central orthographic effects

In this study, we use the association between various measures of the morphological family and decision latencies to reveal the way in which the components of Dutch and English compounds are processed. The results show that for constituents of concatenated compounds in both languages, a position-related token count of the morphological family plays a role, whereas English open compounds show an effect of a type count, similar to the effect of family size for simplex words. When Dutch compounds are written with an artificial space, they reveal no effect of type count, which shows that the differential effect for the English open compounds is not superficial. The final experiment provides converging evidence for the lexical consequences of the space in English compounds. Decision latencies for English simplex words are better predicted from counts of the morphological family that include concatenated and hyphenated but not open family members.

Discrepancies between orthographic and unrelated baselines in masked priming undermine a decompositional account of morphological facilitation.

This study uses the masked priming procedure to compare the decompositionality of regular with irregular English past tense forms relative to both an unrelated baseline and a baseline matched on orthographic similarity to the morphological prime. Morphological facilitation varies with the degree of similarity between related primes and targets. Discrepancies between unrelated and orthographic baselines arise when prime and target match in length and form overlap is high. The outcome demonstrates the key role of baselines in assessments of morphological facilitation and highlights problems of interpretation when evidence of morphological decomposition depends on meeting a statistical criterion for significant morphological facilitation.

What do graded effects of semantic transparency reveal about morphological processing

We examined the influence of semantic transparency on morphological facilitation in English in three lexical decision experiments. Decision latencies to visual targets (e.g., CASUALNESS) were faster after semantically transparent (e.g., CASUALLY) than semantically opaque (e.g., CASUALTY) primes whether primes were auditory and presented immediately before onset of the target (Experiment 1a) or visual with an stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 250 ms (Experiment 1b). Latencies did not differ at an SOA of 48 ms (Experiment 2) or with a forward mask at an SOA of 83 ms (Experiment 3). Generally, effects of semantic transparency among morphological relatives were evident at long but not at short SOAs with visual targets, regardless of prime modality. Moreover, the difference in facilitation after opaque and transparent primes was graded and increased with family size of the base morpheme.

Morphological analysis by child readers as revealed by the fragment completion task

Ten-year-old children performed a fragment completion task. Target fragments (e.g., T_ _N) were preceded by four types of study conditions. The identity condition consisted of the target (TURN). The morphological condition included a related form (TURNED). The orthographic condition consisted of morphologically unrelated words (e.g., TURNIP). Finally, no similar word was presented in the study phase of the no-prime condition. Morphological relatives included orthographically transparent (TURNED- TURN) and orthographically opaque (RIDDEN-RIDE) forms. The results indicated that performance of child readers on the fragment completion task was sensitive to morphological relationships. Completion rates following opaque, as well as transparent, morphological relatives were significantly greater than those following orthographically similar forms. In sum, the fragment completion task provides a viable new tool for examining morphological processing in children and for differentiating morphological effects from effects of similar form.

Morphological processing: A comparison between free and bound stem facilitation

Linguists distinguish between words formed from free stems (e.g., actor: act) and those formed from bound stems (e.g., spectator: spect). In a forward masked priming task, we observed significant morphological facilitation for prime-target pairs that shared either a free (e.g., deform-CONFORM) or a bound (e.g., revive-SURVIVE) stem. Relative to an unrelated baseline, magnitudes of facilitation for free (e.g., form) and bound (e.g., vive) stems were significant and comparable, but relative to an orthographic baseline free stem facilitation was greater than bound stem facilitation. In addition, the magnitude of bound (but not free) stem morphological facilitation correlated with the number of morphological relatives.

Spoken word frequency counts based on 1.6 million words in American English

Written word frequency (e.g., Francis & Kucera, 1982; Kucera & Francis, 1967) constitutes a popular measure of word familiarity, which is highly predictive of word recognition. Far less often, researchers employ spoken frequency counts in their studies. This discrepancy can be attributed most readily to the conspicuous absence of a sizeable spoken frequency count for American English. The present article reports the construction of a 1.6-million-word spoken frequency database derived from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (Simpson, Swales, & Briggs, 2002). We generated spoken frequency counts for 34,922 words and extracted speaker attributes from the source material to generate relative frequencies of words spoken by each speaker category. We assess the predictive validity of these counts, and discuss some possible applications outside of word recognition studies.

Multidimensional data visualization

Historically, data visualization has been limited primarily to two dimensions (e.g., histograms or scatter plots). Available software packages (e.g., Data Desk 6.1, MatLab 6.1, SAS-JMP 4.04, SPSS 10.0) are capable of producing three-dimensional scatter plots with (varying degrees of) user interactivity. We constructed our own data visualization application with the Visualization Toolkit (Schroeder, Martin, & Lorensen, 1998) and Tcl/Tk to display multivariate data through the application of glyphs (Ware, 2000). A glyph is a visual object onto which many data parameters may be mapped, each with a different visual attribute (e.g., size or color). We used our Multi-Dimensional Data Viewer to explore data from several psycholinguistic experiments. The graphical interface provides flexibility when users dynamically explore the multidimensional image rendered from raw experimental data. We highlight advantages of multidimensional data visualization and consider some potential limitations.

When orthographic neighbors fail to facilitate.

Forward masked word primes that differed from the target in the initial, the final or both the initial and final positions tended to slow target decision latencies and there were no significant differences among prime types. After forward masked nonword primes we observed non significant facilitation when primes differed from the target by one letter in either the initial or final position and significant inhibition when primes differed in both initial and final positions. The patterns did not differ significantly for targets with large and with small neighborhoods. Only in post hoc analyses was there any indication of facilitation after nonword neighbor primes and it appeared only when body neighborhood was small. For slower participants, neighbors tended to facilitate target decision latencies while for relatively fast readers showed neighbors made inhibition that tended to vary with amount of mismatch.

With a letter-searched prime, boat primes float but swim and coat don’t: Further evidence for automatic semantic activation

Letter search (LS) on the prime typically eliminates semantic priming (swim-float) and orthographic/phonological (O/P) priming (coat-float) but not morphological priming (marked-mark). However, LS on the prime does not reduce semantic priming for low-frequency targets (Tse & Neely, 2007). These findings suggest that semantic activation survives LS but decays during LS to a low level that can be detected only with sensitive measures, which are afforded by low-frequency targets and morphologically related primes and targets. In the present research, we show that LS on the prime results in 0 msec of semantic priming (e.g., swim-float) and 11 msec of O/P priming (e.g., coat-float), both of which are statistically null, whereas the LS semantic+O/P priming effect for primes and targets that do not share a morpheme (e.g., boat-float) is a robust 37 msec. Discussion focuses on the automaticity of semantic activation and whether morphological priming is mediated by (1) a morphemic representation that is separate from semantic representations or (2) activation combined from semantics and orthography/phonology.