Robert Schreuder

Producing words in a foreign language: Can speakers prevent interference from their first language?

Two picture-word interference experiments were conducted to investigate whether or not words from a first and more dominant language are activated during lexical access in a foreign and less dominant language. Native speakers of Dutch were instructed to name pictures in their foreign language English. Our experiments show that the Dutch name of a picture is activated during initial stages of the process of lexical in English as a foreign language. We conclude that bilingual speakers cannot suppress activation from their first language while naming pictures in a foreign language. The implications for bilingual speech production theories are discussed.

From concepts to lexical items

In this paper we address the question how in language production conceptual structures are mapped onto lexical items. First we describe the lexical system in a fairly abstract way. Such a system consists of, among other things, a fixed set of basic lexical entries characterized by four groups of information: phonetic form, grammatical features, argument structure, and semantic form. A crucial assumption of the paper is that the meaning in a lexical entry has a complex internal structure composed of more primitive elements (decomposition). Some aspects of argument structure and semantic form and their interaction are discussed with respect to the issue of synonymy. We propose two different mappings involved in lexical access. One maps conceptual structures to semantic forms, and the other maps semantic forms to conceptual structures. Both mappings are context dependent and are many-to-many mappings. We present an elaboration of Levelts (1989) model in which these processes interact with the grammatical encoder and the mental lexicon. Then we address the consequences of decomposition for processing models, especially the nature of the input of lexical access and the time course. Processing models that use the activation metaphor may have difficulties accounting for certain phenomena where a certain lemma triggers not one, but two or more word forms that have to be produced with other word forms in between.

Constraining psycholinguistic models of morphological processing and representation: The role of productivity

Listeners can understand novel lexical forms without apparent difficulty. This ability to analyze and interpret an unfamiliar input string raises some important psycholinguistic questions. We are led to ask how this parsing is actually accomplished and what its role is in the recognition of familiar word forms. The Standard psycholinguistic answer to the latter question has been that the human parsing abilities at the lexical level are of only minor importance. Indeed, in modeling lexical processing, psycholinguists have not been particularly concerned with morphological productivity and its implications for lexical processing and storage. This neglect of productivity is clearly apparent in the default view of language comprehension which is assumed to be based upon two radically different processing mechanisms. The first is exploited during word recognition and involves retrieving information from a permanent memory store, the lexicon. The second mechanism allows the integration of the semantic and syntactic information associated with the individually recognized words and their order. These latter processes parse and construct novel sentential representations. Thus, the mechanisms that are capable of generating new linguistic structure are typically reserved for the post-lexical processes.

The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing : The role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity

This article is concerned with the way in which the balance of storage-storing and processing words through full-form representations-and computation-storing and processing words through morpheme-based representations-in lexical processing in the visual modality is affected by the following 3 factors: word formation type (roughly, inflection vs. derivation), productivity, and affixal homonymy. Experimental results for 5 different Dutch suffixes, combined with previous results obtained for 4 comparable Finnish suffixes (R. Bertram, M. Laine, & K. Karvinen, 1999) and 2 Dutch suffixes (R. H. Baayen, T. Dijkstra, & R. Schreuder, 1997), show that none of these factors in isolation is a reliable cross-linguistic predictor of the balance of storage and computation. The authors offer a general framework that outlines how morphological processing is influenced by the interaction of word formation type, productivity, and affixal homonymy.

The morphological family size effect and morphology

It has been reported that in visual lexical decision response latencies to simplex nouns are shorter when these nouns have large morphological families, i.e., when they appear as constituents in large numbers of derived words and compounds. This study presents the results of four experiments that show that verbs have a Family Size effect independently of nominal conversion alternants, that this effect is a strict type frequency effect andnot a token frequency effect, that the effect is co-determined by the morphological structure of the inflected verb, and that it occurs irrespective of the orthographic shape of the base word.

The recognition of reduced word forms

This article addresses the recognition of reduced word forms, which are frequent in casual speech. We describe two experiments on Dutch showing that listeners only recognize highly reduced forms well when these forms are presented in their full context and that the probability that a listener recognizes a word form in limited context is strongly correlated with the degree of reduction of the form. Moreover, we show that the effect of degree of reduction can only partly be interpreted as the effect of the intelligibility of the acoustic signal, which is negatively correlated with degree of reduction. We discuss the consequences of our findings for models of spoken word recognition and especially for the role that storage plays in these models.

Morphological structure in language processing

This volume brings together a series of studies of morphological processing in Germanic (English, German, Dutch), Romance (French, Italian), and Slavic (Polish, Serbian) languages. The question of how morphologically complex words are organized and processed in the mental lexicon is addressed from different theoretical perspectives (single and dual route models), for different modalities (auditory and visual comprehension, writing), and for language development. Experimental work is reported, as well as computational and statistical modeling. Thus, this volume provides a useful overview of the range of issues currently attracting reseach at the intersection of morphology and psycholinguistics.

Affixal Homonymy triggers full-form storage, even with inflected words, even in a morphologically rich language

This paper investigates whether affixal homonymy, the phenomenon that one affix form serves two or more semantic/syntactic functions, affects lexical processing of inflected words in a similar way for a morphologically rich language such as Finnish as for morphologically restricted languages such as Dutch and English. For the latter two languages, there is evidence that affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage for inflected words (Bertram, R., Schreuder, R., and Baayen, R. H. (in press). The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: the role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Sereno and Jongman (1997). Processing of English inflectional morphology. Memory and Cognition, 25, 425-437). Two visual lexical decision experiments show the same pattern for Finnish. Apparently, the substantially richer morphology in Finnish does not prevent full-form storage for inflected words when the affix is homonymic.

War and Peace: Morphemes and Full Forms in a Noninteractive Activation Parallel Dual-Route Model☆

This article introduces a computational tool for modeling the process of morphological segmentation in visual and auditory word recognition in the framework of a parallel dual-route model.

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.