Pseudo-family size influences the processing of French inflections : evidence in favor of a supralexical account.

Madeleine Voga (1) , Hélène Giraudo (2)

1 LLACS - Langues, Littératures, Arts et Cultures des Suds
2 CLLE-ERSS - Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie

Since Rumelhart & McClelland (1986) first presented their connectionist model of the English past tense system, the nature of morphological representation has divided psycholinguists. This question is central in debates about the nature of cognition, since it concerns the understanding of how the lexicon is organized in terms of structural units, and how these units interact with each other during lexical access. One of this domain's important controversies concerns the description of the core units of the lexicon, namely the morpheme versus lexeme problem. The former posits that a unit smaller than the word, preserving basic semantic and orthographic/phonological characteristics and commonly called morpheme is the structural unit of the lexicon, whereas the later argues that morphology is primarily a set of systematic correspondences between the forms and meanings of the words, and that the source of morphology is the network of paradigmatic relations between the existing words of a language. This position implies that it is the word that forms the basis of morphological operations, and that morphology cannot be simply defined as the concatenation of morphemes into words. As pointed out by Aronoff (1994), it is better to speak of lexeme-based morphology, because the term 'word-based' has led to the misunderstanding that it is the concrete form of a word that is the basis for morphological operations. However, it is often an abstract stem form of a lexeme, which never surfaces as a concrete word form, that constitutes the basis for morphological operations, and hence, the term 'lexeme-based' is more appropriate. This lexeme-based view of morphology is shared by many morphologists (Bybee 1988; 2001, Booij 2002): morphology is not the "syntax of morphemes", but the extension of patterns of existing systematic form-meaning correspondences between words. The Dutch tradition of morphological studies provided some pieces of convincing evidence for this view, see the work by Harald Baayen and his colleagues on family size effects (e.g. de Jong et al. 2000).

Domaines: Psychologie

Madeleine Voga, Hélène Giraudo. Pseudo-family size influences the processing of French inflections : evidence in favor of a supralexical account.. Selected Proceedings of the 6th Décembrettes: Morphology in Bordeaux, 2009, pp.148-155. ⟨hal-00986157⟩