TESTING MORPHOLOGICAL PRODUCTIVITY

Morphological Decomposition in Japanese De-adjectival Nominals: Masked and Overt Priming Evidence

Whether morpheme-based processing extends to relatively unproductive derived words remains a matter of debate. Although whole-word storage and access has been proposed for some derived words, such as Japanese de-adjectival nominals with the unproductive (-mi) suffix (e.g., Hagiwara et al. in Language 75:739-763, 1999), Clahsen and Ikemoto (Ment Lex 7:147-182, 2012) found masked priming from de-adjectival nominals with productive (-sa) and unproductive (-mi) suffixes to their adjectivally-inflected base morpheme. Using masked and unmasked priming, we examine whether adjectivally-inflected base morpheme primes facilitate the processing of Japanese de-adjectival nominal targets with a productive or unproductive affix, including an orthographic-overlap condition and semantic relatedness measure that Clahsen and Ikemoto (2012) did not include. Our results replicate and extend Clahsen and Ikemoto (2012), revealing significant, statistically-equivalent morphological priming effects for -sa and -mi affixed targets, independent of orthographic and semantic relatednesss, suggesting that the processing of derived words with the unproductive -mi affix makes recourse to morpheme-level representations.

Using dictionaries to study the mental lexicon

The notion of a mental lexicon has its historical roots in practical reference dictionaries. The distributional analysis of dictionaries provides one means of investigating the structure of the mental lexicon. We review our earlier work with dictionaries, based on a three-way horserace model of lexical access and production, and then present the most recent results of our ongoing analysis of the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition on CD-ROM, which traces changes in productivity over time of the English suffixes -ment and -ity, both of which originate in French borrowings. Our results lead us to question the validity of automatic analogy from a set of existing words as the driving force behind morphological productivity.