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Luke Bradley

Poster

Frequency effects on word recognition in analytic and synthetic languages

1. SupervisorProf. Dr. Dr. h.c. Bernd Kortmann
2. SupervisorDr. Alice Blumenthal-Dramé
3. SupervisorProf. Dr. Cornelius Weiller
Abstract

I am interested in the relationship between morphological typology and lexical processing. Using languages with comparatively rich (German) and poor (Vietnamese) morphology, I examine the dependencies between various frequency metrics, word processing difficulty, and the degree to which complex words are represented holistically. I use masked-primed and unprimed lexical decision to examine whether morphological paradigm and family effects, as well as other frequency effects (established for European languages in the work of Baayen, Kostić, Moscoso del Prado Martín, Milin, Ramscar and others) are attested in both German and Vietnamese at the levels of inflection, derivation and compounding. A further important consideration is the modulation of such effects by the semantic transparency or opacity of derived words or compounds with respect to their roots, which can be estimated by distributional semantic methods. The results have implications for lexical and morphological processing in the world's many isolating languages.

DisciplinLinguistics
LanguagesGerman, Vietnamese
Research DirectionPsycholinguistics, morphology
KeywordsLexical processing, morphological processing, word recognition, isolating languages