The morphology of the mental lexicon: Internal word structure viewed from a psycholinguistic perspective
Title:
The morphology of the mental lexicon: Internal word structure viewed from a psycholinguistic perspective
Author:
Sandra, Dominiek
Appeared in:
Language & cognitive processes
Paging:
Volume 9 (1994) nr. 3 pages 227-269
Year:
1994-08-01
Contents:
A conceptual analysis is made of several ways in which the morphological structure of words might enter their lexical representation and/or processing. Economising on storage space seems an attractive option in light of the linguistic definition of the morpheme. However, for several word types, problems would arise in the mapping of morphs onto morphemes and of morphemic meanings onto whole-word meanings. Moreover, economy is a legal option, which might not be available to the mental lexicon. Alternatively, morphs might be put to the purpose of increasing lexical access speed, as proposed by Taft and Forster (1975) in their prefix-stripping model. It is demonstrated that such a view strips morphology from virtually all of its linguistic aspects. Furthermore, the prefix-stripping model would decrease rather than increase the access speed for several types of prefixed words in a number of languages. Linguistically interesting hypotheses are instantiated by the view that affixes are used for providing the syntactic processor with structural information and by the proposal that morphologically organised representational structures are the result of an encoding/retrieval scheme developed at the time of lexical acquisition/learning. Finally, morphemic units might be involved in processing as the result of the frequency of their letter cluster. It is a remarkable fact in current psycholinguistic research on morphology that, despite the linguistic nature of the study object, the majority of studies addressing it have been concerned with access representations rather than intra-lexical, linguistically relevant representations.
Journal description