Morphological priming by itself: A study of Portuguese conjugations

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• 作者：Joã ; o Verí ; ssimo ; Harald Clahsen
• 关键词：Morphological priming ; Stem formation ; Conjugation classes ; Portuguese morphology
• 刊名：Cognition
• 出版年：2009
• 出版时间：July 2009
• 年：2009
• 卷：112
• 期：1
• 页码：187-194
• 全文大小：182 K

文摘

Does the language processing system make use of abstract grammatical categories and representations that are not directly visible from the surface form of a linguistic expression? This study examines stem-formation processes and conjugation classes, a case of ‘pure’ morphology that provides insight into the role of grammatical structure in language processing. We report results from a cross-modal priming experiment examining 1st and 3rd conjugation verb forms in Portuguese. Although items were closely matched with respect to a range of non-morphological factors, distinct priming patterns were found for 1st and 3rd conjugation stems. We attribute the observed priming patterns to different representations of conjugational stems, combinatorial morphologically structured ones for 1st conjugation and unanalyzed morphologically unstructured ones for 3rd conjugation stems. Our findings underline the importance of morphology for language comprehension indicating that morphological analysis goes beyond the identification of grammatical morphemes.