The goal of the present research is to determine the role of suffixes and morphological schemas in the access and processing of Italian complex words and to investigate whether (and possibly to what extent) suffix salience affects such processes. Two experiments using the masked-priming methodology will contribute to verify if native speakers of Italian organize lexical items according to morphological series as they do according to morphological families.
In usage-based approaches to language representation and process (mainly Bybee’s Network Model and Booij’s Constructional Morphology), morphology is generally conceived as organizing the lexicon according to two main dimensions: i) morphological families, i.e. words connected because sharing the same root: kind/ kindness/ kindly/ unkind/ kind-hearted, etc. and ii) morphological series, i.e. words connected because sharing the same affix kindness/ happiness/ sadness/ abruptness, etc. Psycholinguistic research has mostly confirmed this view, demonstrating with experimental data that words in the mental lexicon are stored according to formal and semantic similarity, thus following morphological principles.
More specifically, the relationship between
morphologically complex words and their roots
(or other members of the same morphological
family) has been extensively investigated by
means of the masked-priming experimental
paradigm
On the other hand, the relationship between
words with the same suffix and the same
morphological schema (in constructional terms), like
kindness/ happiness/ sadness, has been scarcely
investigated yet and results do not allow a
consistent and univocal interpretation.
MarslenWilson et al. 1996 investigated the role of
suffixes in English with a cross-modal technique and
found a significant priming effect for
morphologically related words (e.g. darkness/
TOUGHNESS) and no hints of orthographic priming
when the overlap did not involve real suffixes
(e.g. darkness / HARNESS). More recently,
Duñabeitia, Perea & Carreiras 2008 found
significant facilitation effects on the recognition of
suffixed words in Spanish employing a series of
experiments with different degrees of prime
segmentation: 1) er/ WALKER; 2) %%%%er/
WALKER; 3) baker/ WALKER. The
experiments revealed priming effects in all the
conditions (independently from the degree of
segmentation of the prime) and a clear dissociation
between orthographic and morphological priming
(e.g. brevidad primes igualdad but volumen does
not prime certamen). Taken together these
results were interpreted as a strong evidence in
favor of an early prelexical morphological
decomposition (e.g.,
However, when
The present study
On such premises, in the present research we verify by means of a masked priming experiment and a within-comparison design whether the processing of morphologically complex words is affected by the morphological schema and, more specifically, whether the processing is affected by the formal salience of the suffix.
We choose to run the experiments on Italian not only because Italian has a rich, productive and relatively regular morphology, but also because, being a phonetically ‘conservative’ language, at least significantly more conservative than French, Italian has relatively long suffixes (e.g. lat. -ĭttu(m) > it. -etto vs. fr. –et, realized phonetically as [e] as in it. muretto/fr. muret).
Moreover, as a result of the fact that Italian
has undergone little phonological reduction, it
has a high degree of orthographic transparency
and consistency, which can contribute to the
perception and representation of functional word
endings
Finally, although in Italian the great majority of suffixed words are paroxytone, i.e. stressed on the penultimate syllable, as suffix generally carry the word stress, there is a limited number of proparoxytone words (i.e. stressed on the third to last syllable, with a suffix which does not carry the word stress). Consequently, suffixed words in Italian can have different prosodic contours and suffixes can show different degrees of perceptual prominence at the prosodic level. For these reasons, we considered Italian as an ideal test situation to verify the role of salience on suffixed word processing and access.
More precisely, for our experiments we selected some productive suffixes –tore, –ico and -etto because they show different segmental and prosodic features.
Moreover, they have different degrees of
functional consistency, i.e. a different
proportion between suffixed and non-suffixed words
(i.e. monomophemic words) in a series of
words ending with a given letter string
i. size of the suffix (number of phonemes
and graphemes);
ii. different degrees of morpho-tactic
transparency
-‐ morphological boundary: with -tore the
boundary of the suffix always coincides with
the boundary of the syllable, whereas with –
ico and –etto the suffix is split in the two last
syllables. In the Natural Morphology
framework, the more the morphology overlaps with
the phonological components (i.e. the higher
the morpho-tactic transparency) the easier the
recognition;
iii. word stress: the suffixes -tore and –etto
always carries the word stress, while -ico does
not. Moreover, in Italian, the stressed syllable
has a long vowel [–’to:re] which, although not
phonological, may constitute a perceptual hint
for an easier identification. Finally, words
with –tore and –etto show the more frequent
stress pattern in Italian
According to these criteria – tore is the most salient suffix and –etto is more salient than –ico.
In the first experiment we will verify: a) whether words with a perceptually salient suffix like –tore are recognized faster than words with a less salient suffix like –ico. If this would be the case, the word lavoratore should prime viaggiatore better than ironico primes metallico; b) whether a word belonging to a more consistent word ending series (like –tore) is recognized faster than a word belonging to a less consistent word ending series (like –etto). According to this hypothesis, we expect higher priming effect for words with –tore than for words with –etto.
The affix condition (our test condition), i.e. the effect of the presentation of a suffixed word as a prime on the recognition of a complex target word with the same suffix (servitore/ EDUCATORE, sinfonico / NOSTALGICO, boschetto/ PEZZETTO), will be considered in relation to 3 other conditions: the identity condition (educatore/ EDUCATORE, nostalgico/ NOSTALGICO, pezzetto/ PEZZETTO) which should yield the main facilitation effect and consequently the shortest RTs and the unrelated condition (colomba / EDUCATORE, approccio/ NOSTALGICO, ombelico/ PEZZETTO) which, on the contrary, is expected to yield the smallest facilitation effect and the longest RTs. These two conditions are considered as baselines to assess RTs obtained in the test condition. Moreover, in the stem condition we will contrast the strength of the connection between words with the same suffix and morphological schema (test condition) with the strength of the connection between words sharing the same stem (educare / EDUCATORE, nostalgia / NOSTALGICO, pezzo / PEZZETTO).
In the second experiment we will focus on the issue of the sequential organization of the word, namely that the access and processing of a suffixed word is affected by the position of the suffix at the end of the word and by the (visual) perception of the final part of the word. In order to verify this aspect, we will use the same critical materials as in the first experiment but we will manipulate the location of the fixation point.
Specifically, in the forward mask which precedes the presentation of the prime/target pairs, the fixation marks (####), whose aim is to focus attention on a certain point of the screen, will overlap with the suffix position.
To sum up, our research will contribute to verify the role of suffixes and morphological schemas in the access and processing of Italian complex words and to investigate whether (and possibly to what extent) suffix salience affects such process. Results will indicate if native speakers of Italian organize lexical items according to morphological series as they do according to morphological families.