|
|
 E-mail this message to a friend
|
|
Title:
|
Morphological Segmentation During Silent Reading
|
|
Author:
|
Cintia Widmann
|
|
Email:
|
click here to access email
|
|
Degree Awarded:
|
University of South Carolina
, Program in Linguistics
|
|
Degree Date:
|
2009
|
|
Linguistic Subfield(s):
|
Morphology
Psycholinguistics
|
|
Subject Language(s):
|
English
|
|
Director(s):
|
Anne Bezuidenhout
Paul Malovrh
Barbara Schulz
Robin Morris
|
|
|
Abstract:
|
|
This study tested two hypotheses about the properties of morphological
segmentation: (a) that it applies on phonemic representations, and (b) that
it outputs affixal information that is taken up and used at
representational levels higher than the lexical one. Participants'
eye-movements were monitored while they silently read sentences where the
monomorphemic members (guest; bale) of monomorphemic-polymorphemic (MP)
pairs of heterographic homophones (guest-guessed) and of
monomorphemic-monomorphemic (MM) pairs of heterographic homophones
(bale-bail) were embedded. The results of the first experiment provided
evidence that morphological segmentation applies on phonemic
representations in the absence of orthographic cues, as the MP homophones
(guest) induced a processing cost in First Fixation in the subset of the
data where they were preceded by an adjective-dominant modifier. A cost
emerged clearly in First Fixation and Gaze Duration in Experiment 2, as
well, where the homophones were preceded by balanced noun-adjective
modifiers, and sentence context was tightly controlled. The cost in the MP
condition in Quasi-First Pass Time and Total Time in the adjective-dominant
modifier subset of the data in Experiment 1 suggested that the information
activated via morphological segmentation remains active and is used at
levels of representation higher than the lexical one. Experiment 2 tested
this hypothesis directly. Longer rereading times were found for the MP
homophones again. In addition, readers regressed, from later regions of
text, less often to the adverb placed between the homophone/control and the
matrix clause verb, in the MP condition. This was interpreted as indicating
ease of integration of the adverb with the verb phrase it modifies, via the
affix information made available by morphological segmentation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Page Updated: 26-Nov-2009
Please report any bad links or misclassified data
LINGUIST Homepage | Read
LINGUIST | Contact us
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed
on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.
|
|
