Paronyms for Accelerated Correction of Semantic Errors

* Work done under partial support of Mexican Government (CONACyT, SNI), IPN (CGPI, COFAA) and Korean Government (KIPA Professorship for Visiting Faculty Positions). The second author is currently on Sabbatical leave at Chung-Ang University.

Convergence in word structure: revisiting agglutinative noun inflection in Cappadocian Greek

Cappadocian Greek is reported to display agglutinative inflection in its nominal system, namely, mono-exponential formatives for the marking of case and number, and NOM.SG-looking forms as the morphemic units to which inflection applies. Previous scholarship has interpreted these developments as indicating a shift in morphological type from fusion to agglutination, brought about by contact with Turkish. This study takes issue with these conclusions. By casting a wider net over the inflectional system of the language, it shows that, of the two types of agglutinative formations identified, only one evidences a radical departure from the inherited structural properties of Cappadocian noun inflection. The other, on the contrary, represents a typologically more conservative innovation. The study presents evidence that a combination of system-internal and -external motivations triggered the development of both types, it describes the mechanisms through which the innovation was implemented, and discusses the factors that favoured change.

Morphological decomposition in Broca's aphasia

Background: Few studies have investigated how individuals diagnosed with post-stroke Broca’s aphasia decompose words into their constituent morphemes in real-time processing. Previous research has focused on morphologically complex words in non-time-constrained settings or in syntactic frames, but not in the lexicon. Aims: We examined real-time processing of morphologically complex words in a group of five Greek-speaking individuals with Broca’s aphasia to determine: (1) whether their morphological decomposition mechanisms are sensitive to lexical (orthography and frequency) vs. morphological (stem-suffix combinatory features) factors during visual word recognition, (2) whether these mechanisms are different in inflected vs. derived forms during lexical access, and (3) whether there is a preferred unit of lexical access (syllables vs. morphemes) for inflected vs. derived forms. Methods & Procedures: The study included two real-time experiments. The first was a semantic judgment task necessitating participants’ categorical judgments for high- and low-frequency inflected real words and pseudohomophones of the real words created by either an orthographic error at the stem or a homophonous (but incorrect) inflectional suffix. The second experiment was a letter-priming task at the syllabic or morphemic boundary of morphologically transparent inflected and derived words whose stems and suffixes were matched for length, lemma and surface frequency. Outcomes & Results: The majority of the individuals with Broca’s aphasia were sensitive to lexical frequency and stem orthography, while ignoring the morphological combinatory information encoded in the inflectional suffix that control participants were sensitive to. The letter-priming task, on the other hand, showed that individuals with aphasia—in contrast to controls—showed preferences with regard to the unit of lexical access, i.e., they were overall faster on syllabically than morphemically parsed words and their morphological decomposition mechanisms for inflected and derived forms were modulated by the unit of lexical access. Conclusions: Our results show that in morphological processing, Greek-speaking persons with aphasia rely mainly on stem access and thus are only sensitive to orthographic violations of the stem morphemes, but not to illegal morphological combinations of stems and suffixes. This possibly indicates an intact orthographic lexicon but deficient morphological decomposition mechanisms, possibly stemming from an underspecification of inflectional suffixes in the participants’ grammar. Syllabic information, however, appears to facilitate lexical access and elicits repair mechanisms that compensate for deviant morphological parsing procedures.

English compound and non-compound processing in bilingual and multilingual speakers: effects of dominance and sequential multilingualism

This article reports on a study investigating the relative influence of the first and dominant language on L2 and L3 morpho-lexical processing. A lexical decision task compared the responses to English NV-er compounds (e.g., taxi driver) and non-compounds provided by a group of native speakers and three groups of learners at various levels of English proficiency: L1 Spanish-L2 English sequential bilinguals and two groups of early Spanish-Basque bilinguals with English as their L3. Crucially, the two trilingual groups differed in their first and dominant language (i.e., L1 Spanish-L2 Basque vs. L1 Basque-L2 Spanish). Our materials exploit an (a)symmetry between these languages: while Basque and English pattern together in the basic structure of (productive) NV-er compounds, Spanish presents a construction that differs in directionality as well as inflection of the verbal element (V[3SG] + N). Results show between and within group differences in accuracy and response times that may be ascribable to two factors besides proficiency: the number of languages spoken by a given participant and their dominant language. An examination of response bias reveals an influence of the participants' first and dominant language on the processing of NV-er compounds. Our data suggest that morphological information in the nonnative lexicon may extend beyond morphemic structure and that, similarly to bilingualism, there are costs to sequential multilingualism in lexical retrieval.