Morphological Family Size in a Morphologically Rich Language: The Case of Finnish Compared With Dutch and Hebrew

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger mor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition memory, and cognition, 2004-11, Vol.30 (6), p.1271-1278
Main Authors: Martín, Fermín Moscoso del Prado, Bertram, Raymond, Häikiö, Tuomo, Schreuder, Robert, Baayen, R. Harald
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Comparative studies
Contrastive Linguistics
Cross-Cultural Comparison
Finno Ugric Languages
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Hebrew language
Human
Humans
Indo European Languages
Language
Language Processing
Languages
Lexical Decision
Linguistics - methods
Miscellaneous
Morphology (Language)
Morphology (Languages)
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Response Latency
Semantics
Semitic Languages
Words (Phonetic Units)
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Summary:Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.
ISSN:0278-7393
1939-1285
DOI:10.1037/0278-7393.30.6.1271