Li8
Structure of English
Evidence for morphological
structure
Morphology
“Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to
look at the word itself. Mankind. Basically, it’s made up
of two separate words - ‘mank’ and ‘ind.’ What do
these words mean? It’s a mystery, and that’s why so is
mankind.”
Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
Morphemes
Morphology is the study of morphemes and
their behavior.
 A morpheme is the minimal unit of meaning.
 dogs contains 2 morphemes:

dg‘quadruped of the genus canis’
 2 -z
‘plural’
1
Note: morphemes  words
 A word is the smallest element that can
occur in isolation.

Evidence for morphological
decomposition and storage
New singulars
 New morphemes
 Psycholinguistic evidence

 Rule-governed behavior
 Priming studies
 Event Related Potentials
 Speech errors
 Disorders
New singulars
 indice,
homo sapien
New morphemes



-a/oholic
-burger
-gate:


-head:


Watergate, Fornigate
pothead, metalhead, techhead,
gearhead, theoryhead,
crackhead, hockey head
Mc-:

McMansion, mcjob, mcnews
It's true, I'm a
Rageaholic...I just can't
live without Rageahol!
McDonald's not lovin' McJob dictionary definition
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP, 11-2003) -- McDonald's says it
deserves a break from the unflattering way the latest
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary depicts its job
opportunities. Among some 10,000 new additions to
an updated version released in June was the term
"McJob," defined as "low paying and dead-end
work." In an open letter to Merriam-Webster,
McDonald's CEO Jim Cantalupo said the term is "an
inaccurate description of restaurant employment"
and "a slap in the face to the 12 million men and
women" who work in the restaurant industry. The
company e-mailed the letter to media organizations
Friday, and it also was published in the Nov. 3 edition of
an industry trade publication. Cantalupo also wrote that
"more than 1,000 of the men and women who own and
operate McDonald's restaurants today got their start by
serving customers behind the counter.“ McDonald's, the
world's largest restaurant chain, has more than 30,000
restaurants and more than 400,000 employees. Walt
Riker, a spokesman for McDonald's, said the Oak
Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant also is
concerned that "McJob" closely resembles McJOBS,
the company's training program for mentally and
physically challenged people.
"McJOBS is trademarked and we've notified them
that legally that's an issue for us as well," Riker said.
McJob (mkdZAb) n.
A low-paying job that
requires little skill and
provides little opportunity
for advancement.
Source: Merriam-Webster
Online
Psycholinguistic
evidence
Over-regularization
went  goed  went
 Happens c. late twos
 Suggests acquisition of morphological
rules

Wug tests




Berko 1958
3 surface manifestations of English regular plural /-z/: [z], [s],
[əz]
When/how do children learn these rules?
Test paradigm

Children are presented with a pretend creature and told, "This is a
wug."
 Another wug is revealed, and the researcher says, "Now there are
two of them. There are two __."

Results

Very young children are baffled by the question and are unable to
answer correctly, responding with e.g. “two wug."
 Children in grade 1 were almost fully competent with both [s] and
[z].
 Both preschool and first-grade children dealt poorly with [əz],
giving the correct answer less than half the time, possibly because
it occurs in the most restrictive context.

Major finding

The first experimental proof that young children have extracted
generalizable morphological rules from the language around them.
Productive irregulars


Al Jallad, Flint, and Richardson 2005
Subjects come up with past tense for unfamiliar V.

1. Jim BLINGS everyday.


Yesterday Alan __________________.
Subjects in the experiment



Yesterday John __________________.
2. Alan CHINES everyday.


Overall Rate of Irregular forms supplied
26 children: age 6-7 (oral test)
44 adults (written questionnaire)
Sample Over-Irregularizations

children





pake  pakeded
bling  blung, blang
flink  flunk
frim  frand
adults





mang  mung
shride  shrude
bling  blank
morget  morgot
tind  tind
Individual Differences in Irregularization: bars show
percentages of subjects making 0-20% irregulars,
20-40% irregulars etc.
ERPs


McKinnon et al. 2003.
Observation


Prediction


If readers treat non-words containing nonproductive morphemes (in-ceive) as unanalysed
wholes, then these non-words should elicit
larger N400s than matched words (receive).
Results


Pronounceable non-words (flermuf) elicit largeramplitude N400 components than words
(muffler).
Bound-stem non-words elicit a brain response
highly similar to that elicited by real words.
Conclusion

Morphological decomposition and
representation extend to non-productive
morphemes.
Broth:Brothel:Brother

Rastle et al. 2004

Participants made visual lexical decisions to stem targets preceded by
masked primes sharing





(a) a semantically-transparent morphological relationship with the target
(e.g., cleaner-CLEAN);
(b) an apparent morphological relationship, but no semantic relationship, with
the target (e.g., corner-CORN);
(c) a non-morphological form relationship with the target (e.g., brothelBROTH).
Results showed significant and equivalent masked priming effects
in cases in which primes and targets appeared to be
morphologically related, and priming in these conditions could be
distinguished from non-morphological form priming.
These findings suggest a level of representation at which apparently
complex words are decomposed based on their morpho-orthographic
properties.
Morphological
speech errors
Morphological errors
– Morpheme exchange
– slicely thinned
– Feature shift
– have to went for had to go
– Faulty access
– have teachen for have taught
– concludement for conclusion
– Experimentally controlled morphological
errors…
Janssen and Humphreys 2002

General logic:

If a string of phonemes with an identifiable meaning can move
independently during a speech error, it is a production unit, with a
separate, independent representation at some cognitive level.



Inflectional morphemes (e.g. -ed, -ing, -s) are much more error prone than
derivational morphemes (e.g. -er, -ness, -able, -ion) (Garrett 1980,
Humphreys, 2002).
Can we also find experimental speech error evidence of derivational
decomposition?
Prediction:
 If derivational morphemes are stored independently from their stems,
more morphological speech errors should occur when -er is a real
morpheme than when it is only a pseudo-morpheme.
English derivational -er
cpv adj
nice+er
agentive
work+er
pseudo-morph
summer
Method

elicited morphological errors from speakers by presenting a series of word
quads, made up of two pairs. Speakers read these words silently, after which
they disappeared. Speakers were occasionally cued to respond aloud, as
quickly as possible, to the immediately preceding item. Speakers had to then
either repeat the previous phrases exactly, or had to swap words between
the phrases. The critical pairs each consisted of an initial ller word plus a
critical word stem or stem+affix.
Results


More affix errors occurred on the morphologically complex
forms than on the pseudo-morphs.
Conclusion: derivational affixes are also stored as separate
morphemes.
Morphological
disorders
Lexical disorder

Badecker 2001


CSS (65 years old) suffered a left cerebro-vascular accident in 1990,
resulting in lexical impairments manifested in reading, repetition, and oral
and written naming tasks.
Apart from word-finding problems, CSS’s spoken output is fluent and he
exhibits no apparent comprehension impairment.
picture naming
naming from
definition
monomorphemes: 80% correct
Slender-bodied insect with
broad, often brightly-colored
wings.
“butterfly”
“butterfly”
polymorphemes: 50% correct!
doctor fly
sun
wheel pill
Semantic disorders
“Deep dyslexia” = semantic errors during
reading
 Buchanan et al. 2003

 Deep
dyslexic patient (JO, 48, L temporo-parietal
lobectomy)

Acquired reading disorder characterized by production of:


morphological errors (e.g., SLEEP read as SLEEPING)
semantic errors (e.g. HEART read as BLOOD)
Experiment

Method


-O
T-
DOORMAN
SHOEHORN
O-
POTHOLE
DEADLINE
Manipulate transparency in compound word naming study
Results





94 stimuli
10 read correctly; 9 of these were TT
Transparent components read correctly more often
Key point: if there were no decomposition, all compound types should show the
same error rate
Response to PANCAKE:



cake, breakfast, man,. . .cake, man. . .cake, mancake, man, man, p-, p-, cake,
birthday, breakfast, cake, p-a-n. . . cake, syrup...
Typical semantic error: [target] cake  [output] birthday (shows decomposition)
NB 2nd and last attempts are semantic associate for the whole compound
(BREAKFAST, SYRUP)


-T
Shows successful access of meaning of the compound, even though she never manages to say
the whole thing
Conclusion

JO can successfully parse compound into constituents and access meaning of
the whole; the errors occur after this point
Deep dyslexia

Rastle et al. 2005

Observation:



Two competing explanations:
1.
2.

representations are morphologically structured
low imageability/frequency word modified to visually similar word of
higher imageability/frequency) (Funnell 1987)
Prediction:



Deep dyslexics often make morphological errors in reading aloud
e.g. sexist read as sexy
Theory 1 predicts more stem errors with morphologically complex
words (killer) than with pseudosuffixed words (corner) and
monomorphemic words (cornea) when one equalizes for
imageability and frequency.
Theory 2 predicts no difference between these 3 categories.
Result:

Theory 1 (but not Theory 2) supported
Regular vs. irregular

Ullman et al. 1997, Ullman 2001 propose that:



the left inferior frontal cortex (along with the basal ganglia) is involved in rule-based
computations
Irregular forms dealt with differently
Prediction:


Test:





anterior aphasics and Parkinson patients performed worse with regular than irregular verbs
the opposite for posterior aphasics and Alzheimer patients
Conclusion:


Four types of patients: Parkinsons, Alzheimers, anterior aphasics, and posterior aphasics
Patients were asked to perform a sentence completion task requiring the production of a verb
in the past tense
E.g. “Every day I dig a hole. Just like every day, yesterday I ____ a hole”
Results:


A lesion to this region should impair only regular morphological processes, sparing the ability
to produce irregular morphology.
But…
Results consistent with theory that the left frontal cortex and basal ganglia are involved in
rule-based language processing but not in the processing of irregular morphology, and that
temporal lobe areas are implicated in the storage of lexical forms.
Regular vs. irregular

Problem with Ullman’s theory
 Agrammatic
(Broca’s) aphasics who perform
worse on irregular than regular morphological
transformations (producing irregular V forms)



patient RC (Shapiro & Caramazza 2003)
patient MR (Laiacona & Caramazza 2004)
Spanish-Catalan bilinguals (Caramazza et al. 2004)
 Consistent
with the classical view that left inferior
frontal cortex is involved in morphosyntactic
processing and not just in rule-based
transformations.
Conclusions
Humans decompose words into morphemes
and store them as such.
 Both regular and irregular/restricted morphology
involve rule-governed (de)composition.

 blang,

inceive, Broca’s aphasics
Humans look for morphological structure even
when there isn’t any.
 cheeseburger,
corner
References
Andrews, S. 1986. Morphological influences on lexical access: Lexical or nonlexical effects? Journal of Memory
and Language, 25, 726-740.
Andrews, S., B. Miller, & K. Rayner. 2004. Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words:
There is a mouse in mousetrap. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 16:285-311.
Badecker, William. 2001. Lexical composition and the production of compounds: evidence from errors in naming.
Language and Cognitive Processes 16.4.
Buchanan, Lori, Shannon McEwen, Chris Westbury, and Gary Libben. 2003. Semantics and semantic errors:
Implicit access to semantic information from words and nonwords in deep dyslexia. Brain and Language
84:65–83.
Caramazza, Alfonso, Alessandro Laudanna, and Cristina Romani. 1988. Lexical access and inflectional
morphology. Cognition 28.
Fiorentino, Robert. 2006. Masked priming of compound constituents: Implications for morphological
decomposition. Manuscript, University of Maryland.
Janssen, Dirk and Karin Humphreys. 2002. Morphological speech errors on agentive and comparative affixes.
Third International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Banff, Canada.
McKinnon, R., M. Allen, & L. Osterhout. 2003. Morphological decomposition involving non-productive
morphemes: ERP Evidence. Neuroreport 14:883-886.
Marslen-Wilson et al. 1994. Psychol Rev 101:3-33.
Rastle, Kathleen, Matthew Davis, and Boris New. 2004. The Broth in my Brother’s Brothel: Morpho-Orthographic
Segmentation in Visual Word Recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11.6:1090-1098.
Rastle, Kathleen, et al. 2005. New evidence for morphological errors in deep dyslexia. Brain and Language
97:189-199.
Shapiro, K., & Alfonso Caramazza. 2003. Looming a loom: Evidence for independent access to grammatical and
phonological properties in verb retrieval. Journal of Neurolinguistics 16:85-111.