Morphological Family Size in a Morphologically Rich Language: The Case of Finnish Compared With Dutch and Hebrew.
- 1 January 2004
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
- Vol. 30 (6) , 1271-1278
- https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.30.6.1271
Abstract
Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.Keywords
This publication has 17 references indexed in Scilit:
- Putting the bits together: an information theoretical perspective on morphological processingCognition, 2004
- Morphological resonance in the mental lexiconPublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,2003
- Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of TimeCognitive Psychology, 2001
- The morphological family size effect and morphologyLanguage and Cognitive Processes, 2000
- Effects of Family Size for Complex WordsJournal of Memory and Language, 2000
- Affixal Homonymy triggers full-form storage, even with inflected words, even in a morphologically rich languageCognition, 1999
- IndiumSynlett, 1999
- How Complex Simplex Words Can BeJournal of Memory and Language, 1997
- Regression analyses of repeated measures data in cognitive research.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1990
- Robust Locally Weighted Regression and Smoothing ScatterplotsJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1979