Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  The Linguistic Sophistication of Morphological Decomposition: More than Islands of Regularity

1527586146 pdf A wealth of psycholinguistic evidence has shown that words, before being visually recognized, decompose into smaller orthographic units which may seem to correspond to, but arent necessarily, morphemes. Such a procedure of morphological decomposition is commonly assumed to solely rely on islands of regularity namely, statistical orthographic regularities, with no regard to the words meaning. Building on these results, the present investigation assesses the sensitivity of decomposition to non-semantic (i.e., phonological, lexical, and morpho-syntactic) properties, as a way to probe the time-course of visual word processing. In showing that decomposition may also be affected by whole-word lexicality and whole-word frequency, this book proposes a novel model of lexical access, in which decomposition encompasses a multi-step mechanism that first generates multiple possible morpho-orthographic decomposition patterns of the visual stimulus, and then evaluates them in parallel in order to choose the optimal candidate for activation. Read more