The role of syllables in intermediate-depth stress-timed languages: masked priming evidence in European Portuguese

Is morphology a discrete and independent element of lexical structure or does it simply reflect a fine-tuning of the system to the statistical correlation that exists among orthographic and semantic properties of words? Hebrew provides a unique opportunity to examine morphological processing in the brain because of its rich morphological system. In an fMRI masked priming experiment, we investigated the neural networks involved in implicit morphological processing in Hebrew. In the lMFG and lIFG, activation was found to be significantly reduced when the primes were morphologically related to the targets. This effect was not influenced by the semantic transparency of the morphological prime, and was not found in the semantic or orthographic condition. Additional morphologically related decrease in activation was found in the lIPL, where activation was significantly modulated by semantic transparency. Our findings regarding implicit morphological processing suggest that morphology is an automatic and distinct aspect of visually processing words. These results also coincide with the behavioral data previously obtained demonstrating the central role of morphological processing in reading Hebrew.

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On the role of syllabic neighbourhood density in the syllable structure effect in European Portuguese

Lingua ◽

10.1016/j.lingua.2021.103166 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 103166

Author(s):

Ana Duarte Campos ◽

Helena Mendes Oliveira ◽

Ana Paula Soares

Keyword(s):

Syllable Structure ◽

Structure Effect ◽

European Portuguese

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Grammar and context in Functional Discourse Grammar

Pragmatics ◽

10.1075/prag.24.2.02hen ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 203-227 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Kees Hengeveld ◽

J. Lachlan Mackenzie

Keyword(s):

Contextual Information ◽

Guiding Principle ◽

Exchange Of Information ◽

Direct Exchange ◽

Proper Functioning ◽

European Portuguese ◽

Linguistic Representations ◽

Discourse Grammar

This article presents a proposal for the organization of the Contextual Component in Functional Discourse Grammar. A guiding principle in this proposal is that, given the fact that Functional Discourse Grammar is a theory of grammar, the Contextual Component should provide the information that is necessary for a proper functioning of the grammar rather than aim at an exhaustive specification of all the information that plays a role in interpreting linguistic expressions. The Contextual Component contains situational and discursive information and is organized in different strata that correspond to the interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic, and phonological levels of representation within the grammar. The contextual representations make use of the same formalizations as the corresponding linguistic representations, thus allowing for direct exchange of information between the Grammatical and the Contextual Components. Thus exchange of information is handled by an interface called the contextualizer. The article illustrates the functioning of this model by analyzing the role of contextual information with respect to three grammatical phenomena in three different languages: Unexpressed arguments in Turkish, English too, and answers to yes/no questions in European Portuguese.

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Interwoven functionality of the brain’s action and language systems

The Mental Lexicon ◽

10.1075/ml.5.2.05bou ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 231-254 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Véronique Boulenger ◽

Tatjana A. Nazir

Keyword(s):

Word Meaning ◽

Masked Priming ◽

Action Perception ◽

Semantic Retrieval ◽

Motor Action ◽

Electrophysiological Studies ◽

Neuroimaging Study ◽

Action Verbs ◽

The Brain

Theories of embodied cognition consider language understanding as intimately linked to sensory and motor processes. Here we review evidence from kinematic and electrophysiological studies for the idea that processing of words referring to bodily actions, even when subliminally presented, recruits the same motor regions that are involved in motor control. We further discuss the functional role of the motor system in action word retrieval in light of neuropsychological data showing modulation of masked priming effects for action verbs in Parkinson’s patients as a function of dopaminergic treatment. Finally, a neuroimaging study revealing semantic somatotopy in the motor cortex during reading of idioms that include action words is presented. Altogether these findings provide strong arguments that semantic mechanisms are grounded in action-perception systems of the brain. They support the existence of common brain signatures to action words, even when embedded in idiomatic sentences, and motor action. They further suggest that motor schemata reflecting word meaning contribute to lexico-semantic retrieval of action words.

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What psych verbs and other verbs disclose about the role of Semantic Prominence and Thematic Hierarchy in affixal selection

Linguística: Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do Porto ◽

10.21747/16466195/lingespa3 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 47-69

Author(s):

Alexandra Soares Rodrigues

Keyword(s):

Scientific Knowledge ◽

Semantic Structure ◽

Semantic Features ◽

Lexical Semantic ◽

European Portuguese ◽

Psych Verbs

This paper analyses the construction of deverbal adjectives in European Portuguese, focusing on the interface between morphology and semantics, specifically on the role of Thematic Hierarchy and Semantic Prominence on affixal selection.Supported by paradigmatic morphology, the paper shows that suffixes that work in macro-paradigms of deverbal adjectives establish a relationship with specific semantic features of the lexical-semantic structure of the base verb in order to construct the derivative. The analysis concludes that suffixes are sensitive to thematic hierarchy, which is based on the semantic prominence of features of the verbs’ theta-roles at work in the paradigm. Data from psych verbs is highly relevant to this finding.The paper is dedicated to Professor Ana Maria Brito, who has always been keenly aware that scientific knowledge is not confined to a specific theory.

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Morphological priming of inflectional suffixes

10.31219/osf.io/s8awx ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Katarina Marjanovic ◽

Davide Crepaldi

Keyword(s):

Priming Effect ◽

Word Identification ◽

Masked Priming ◽

Visual Word ◽

Priming Paradigm ◽

Morphological Priming ◽

Visual Word Identification ◽

The Rich ◽

Complex Words

Morphologically complex words are processed through their constituent morphemes during visual word recognition. While this has been primarily established through the stem priming paradigm, the role of shared affixes is more controversial. Also, most evidence on affix priming comes from derivation, while inflectional priming remains largely unaddressed. Here we present two lexical decision, masked priming experiments filling this gap. Taking advantage of the rich inflectional pattern of Slovene, we assessed inflectional suffix priming (mestam–HALJAM), and compared it to the well-established stem priming effect (haljov–HALJAM): while the latter is solid as expected, the former seems to be weak to non–existing. Results further indicate that there is no interaction between sharing a stem and sharing an inflectional suffix—neither stem nor suffix priming is boosted when primes and targets also share the other morpheme. These data indicate an important difference between stems, derivational affixes and inflectional affixes, which we consider in the context of models of visual word identification and information theory.

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Adaptação acústico-prosódica entre falantes

Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística ◽

10.26334/2183-9077/rapln4ano2018a28 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 18-33

Author(s):

Vera Cabarrão ◽

Helena Moniz ◽

Fernando Batista ◽

Isabel Trancoso ◽

Ana Isabel Mata

Keyword(s):

Strong Evidence ◽

Global Analysis ◽

Gender Effects ◽

European Portuguese ◽

And Gender ◽

Almost All ◽

Distinct Features

This paper presents a global analysis of entrainment in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese, including 48 dialogues, between 24 speakers. Our main goal is to analyze the acoustic-prosodic similarities between speaker pairs, namely if there are global entrainment cues displayed in the dialogues, if entrainment is manifested in distinct sets of features shared amongst the speakers, if entrainment depends on the gender and role of the speaker (giver or follower), and if speakers tend to entrain more with specific interlocutors regardless of the role. Results show that globally speakers tend to be more similar to their partners than to their own speech in the majority of the analyzed features, a strong evidence for entrainment. Moreover, almost all the pairs of speakers display cues of global entrainment, even though in different degrees (speakers entrain but in distinct features). Additionally, the role and gender effects tend to be less striking than the specific interlocutor effect. Our results support the fact that all prosodic parameters are monitored by the speakers in our corpus, contrarily to studies for other languages, which indicate that the main cues are energy related.

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