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by Catherine-Marie Longtin, Juan Segui, and Pierre A. Halle´ Laboratoire de Psychologie Expe´rimentale, CNRS, Universite´ Rene´ Descartes, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

Presented by Jaber MaslamaniLIN 7901 Psycholinguistics

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Morphological Priming without Morphological Relationship

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Background:

Multiple studies have tried to understand the role of morphology in processing of multi-morphemic words. This particular study is about French and the processing of simple and complex French words.

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Previous studies (like Marslen-Wilson et al. 1994) showed that English semantically transparent words primed their base (government primes govern) but that semantically opaque words do not (apartment does not prime apart).

Possible conclusion: opaque words are probably stored as a whole unit, and transparent words are probably stored each morpheme separately.

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But a study by Frost et. al (1997) showed that for Hebrew, such an effect did not occur, and therefore that conclusion may not be valid.

These two studies used different experimental techniques and different languages, so it is hard to say why they had different results. (The Marslen-Wilson study used audio primes, and the Frost study used visual primes).

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Studies following up on this found that the effect were probably due to language. There are on one hand languages like Hebrew or Arabic with non-concatenative morphology, and on the other hand languages like English with concatenative morphology.

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Examples from non-concatenative Arabic morphology

the Arabic root k-t-b can have different but semantically-related meanings. Thus, [katab] ‘he wrote’,[kita:b] ‘book’,[kutub] ‘books’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconcatenative_morphology

[maktaba] ‘library’[kutayyeb] ‘booklet’ all come from the root k-t-b.

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This study

This study uses French, since French morphology is concatenative like English.

The study has 2 experiments, one with only visual primes and one with audio primes.

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Further, there are 4 conditions/types of pairs: 1. semantically transparent pairs2. semantically opaque pairs 3. pseudo-derived pairs 4. orthographic pairs

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Goal of the study

The study aims at assessing the role of semantic transparency in French and in particular to establish whether pseudo-derived words are processed in the same way as opaque words or as orthographic controls are .

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Explantion of pairs:

In each of the two experiments, there was a prime and a target. The prime carried some kind of morphology which the target lacked. The exception is the orthographic pairs, in which the prime did not have a real suffix from the language.

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1. Semantically transparent pairs: They are those pairs that have some very obvious relationship (they are semantically and etymologically related). EXAMPLES: Ex1. gaufrette/GAUFRE (wafer/waffle) or Ex2. rondelle/ROND (puck/round). English equivalent would be booklet/book.

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2. Semantically opaque pairs:

They bore some relationship to each other at some point in the language, but that relationship is no longer obvious (so they are etymologically but not semantically related). EXAMPLES: Ex1. lunette/LUNE (glasses/moon) or Ex2. cannelle/CANNE (cinammon/cane) English equivalent would be question/quest .

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3. Pseudo-derived pairs:

They have no semantic relationship. The prime could be interpreted as morphologically complex, because it ends in a French suffix, but which is not acting as a suffix here. EXAMPLES: Ex1. coupable/COUPER (guilty/to cut) or Ex2. traiter/TRAIT (to treat/a feature). English equivalent would be final/fine (vs. dismissal/dismiss, where the -al is acting morphologically).

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4. Orthographic pairs: They are pairs that have no semantic relationship, but share some spelling. Unlike the pseudo-derived pairs, the prime does not have a morphological ending; it cannot be decomposed. EXAMPLES: Ex1. abricot/ABRI (apricot/shelter, -cot is not a French suffix) or Ex2. auberge/AUBE (hotel/dawn, -erge is not a French suffix). English equivalent would be pillow/pill (because -ow is not an English suffix). Since there will be no priming, this is the control condition.

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Le Nouveau Petit Robert Dictionary by Rey-Debove, J., & Rey, A. (1993) was used to ascertain the semantic relationships between words.

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Experiment 1: Visual Masked Priming

(visual prime/visual target) Participants: 43 French speaking student from France, although several had to be rejected because of high error rates, or very slow 'yes' response times. The final number of 36 participants. Targets: were totally 240 targets, 120 of which were word targets, and 120 were nonword targets. There was an a training session of 20 trials.

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Procedure: For each trial, subjects saw a pre-mask of ######### in the middle of the screen for 500ms. Then the prime would appear for only 46ms, masked immediately by the target, which appeared for 3000ms, or until there was a response. Using DMDX, participants were to decide if the word they saw was a word of French or not. They were not told of the prime. Each trial lasted 12 minutes.

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Results of Experiment 1: Priming had a significant overall effect. Responses were faster in all conditions except the orthographic pairs. This shows that in French there is no effect of semantic opacity on priming, because the opaque and pseudo-derived pairs had the same effect as the transparent pairs, not the orthographic pairs.

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Experiment 2: Auditory-Visual Cross-Modal

Priming

(auditory prime/visual target) The materials and the design of this experiment were the same as Experiment 1. This time the prime would be an auditory stimulus, and the target would be visual. The auditory stimuli for this were recorded by a native speaker of Canadian French.

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Participants: 37 students, native speakers of Canadian French, four of whom had to be excluded because of slow response times, leaving 33.Procedure: Each trial began with a big (+) in the middle of the screen for 500ms, followed by the audio prime. The visual target was displayed on screen at the end of the sound. It remained for 1500ms, or until a response was given. Again, participants were told to press a button if the string of letters on screen was a French word, and another button if not.

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Results of Experiment 2: Priming had no significant effect overall, and only the transparent pairs showed any effect of priming The researchers say this confirms that opaque and pseudo-derived pairs are processed the same way, since they showed the same effects of priming. It also confirms that semantic transparency plays a central role in the cross-modal paradigm for languages have non-concatenative morphology.

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General Discussion & Conclusions

There were quite different results for the experiments. In visual masked priming, there was facilitation for all the pairs except orthographic. In the cross-modal experiment, there was only facilitation for the semantically transparent pairs. The results of the masked priming experiment suggest that two words sharing the same root morphemes prime each other, whether they share the same meaning or not.

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Morphemic composition in French is not as salient as in some other languages (such as Hebrew).

For example, in the cross-modal experiment, there was no priming effect in the opaque or pseudo-derived pairs in French, but research in Hebrew has shown this effect.

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Another issue to be investigated is the role of productivity of the morphemes. Is there any effect of affixes that are very common in the language versus very rare in the language?

This may have to do with how morphologically rich the language is.

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Marslen-Wilson (2001) proposed a continuum of languages from morphologically rich ones (Hebrew & Arabic) to morphologically poor ones (like Mandarin Chinese). French falls closer to the Hebrew end of things.

In these languages, perhaps morphological priming without true morphological relationships may be due to the richness of the languages' system.

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Thank you