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Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects

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Abstract

Most psycholinguistic models of lexical processing assume that the comprehension and production of inflected forms is mediated by morphemic constituents. Several more recent studies, however, have challenged this assumption by providing empirical evidence that information about individual inflected forms and their paradigmatic relations is available in long-term memory (Baayen et al. 1997; Milin et al. 2009a, 2009b). Here, we investigate how whole-word frequency, inflectional paradigm size and morphological family size affect production latencies and articulation durations when subjects are asked to read aloud isolated Estonian case-inflected nouns. In Experiment 1, we observed that words with a larger morphological family elicited shorter speech onset latencies, and that forms with higher whole-word frequency had shorter acoustic durations. Experiment 2, for which we increased statistical power by using 2,800 words, revealed that higher whole-word frequency, inflectional paradigm size, and morphological family size reduced both speech onset times and acoustic durations. These results extend our knowledge of morphological processing in three ways. First, whole-word frequency effects of inflected forms in morphologically rich languages are not restricted to a small number of very high-frequency forms, contrary to previous claims (Niemi et al. 1994; Hankamer 1989; Yang 2016). Second, we replicated the morphological family size effect in a new domain, the acoustic durations of inflected forms. Third, we showed that a novel paradigmatic measure, inflectional paradigm size, predicts word naming latencies and acoustic durations. These results fit well with Word-and-Paradigm morphology (Blevins 2016) and argue against strictly (de)compositional models of lexical processing.

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Notes

  1. http://www.cl.ut.ee/korpused/grammatikakorpus/ (15.04.2017).

  2. jalgadel and jalul both express adessive plurals, but jalgadel has more external locational meaning (something is on the feet) and jalul more a idiosyncratic meaning as ‘back on the feet’.

  3. Hence, some inflected forms were counted neither as a part of inflectional paradigm nor orthographic neighbourhood count.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Pärtel Lippus and Einar Meister for their assistance with the data collection as well as the editor-in-chief Olivier Bonami and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful reviews on the earlier version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, 4-32 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E7, Canada

    Kaidi Lõo & Benjamin V. Tucker

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, 4-55 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E7, Canada

    Juhani Järvikivi

  3. Department of Linguistics, University of Tübingen, Wilhelmstrasse 19, 72074, Tübingen, Germany

    Fabian Tomaschek & R. Harald Baayen

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  1. Kaidi Lõo
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  2. Juhani Järvikivi
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Correspondence to Kaidi Lõo.

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This research was supported by the national scholarship program Kristjan Jaak, funded and managed by Archimedes Foundation in collaboration with the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research and by an Alexander von Humboldt research award (grant number 1141527) to the first and last author, respectively.

Appendix A

Appendix A

Table 7 Pairwise correlations between the key predictors in Experiment 1
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Table 8 Pairwise correlations between the key predictors in Experiment 2
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Lõo, K., Järvikivi, J., Tomaschek, F. et al. Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects. Morphology 28, 71–97 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-017-9318-7

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