Morphological structure governs the process of accessing grammatical gender in the course of production

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maya Dank ◽  
Avital Deutsch
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Congruency Effect ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Naming Latency ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Gender Information ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
Organizational Principles ◽  
Gender Congruency Effect ◽  
Syntactic Context

The present study investigated the process of accessing gender information when producing inanimate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency and accuracy were measured. The gender congruency effect has been tested in various Indo-European languages, with mixed results. It seems to depend on both language-specific attributes and the syntactic context of the utterance. Speakers’ insensitivity to gender congruency was observed at 3 SOAs (Experiment 1a–1c). Neither the production of bare nouns (Experiments 1 & 3) nor gender-marked NPs (Experiment 2) elicited the effect. Nevertheless, the same procedure and targets revealed a semantic effect. The present findings in Hebrew deviate from previous results obtained with Indo-European languages. The results are discussed in connection with Hebrew’s nonconcatenative morphological features and the way linguistic characteristics govern the organizational principles of the mental lexicon and lexical access.

Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of gender marking: Evidence from the gender-congruency effect in Hebrew speech production

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-402
Author(s):  
Avital Deutsch ◽  
Maya Dank
Keyword(s):  
Congruency Effect ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Naming Latency ◽  
Inhibitory Effect ◽  
Stimulus Onset ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Linguistic System ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Gender Congruency Effect

This study investigated the gender-congruency effect of animate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture–Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency revealed an inhibitory gender-congruency effect, as naming the pictures took longer in the presence of a gender-congruent distractor than with a distractor from a different gender category. The inhibitory effect was demonstrated for feminine (morphologically marked) nouns, across two stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) (Experiments 1a and 1b), and masculine (morphologically unmarked) nouns (Experiment 2). The same pattern was observed when participants had to produce bare nouns (Experiment 1) or gender-marked noun phrases (Experiment 3). The inhibitory pattern of the effect resembles previous findings of bare nouns in a subset of Romance languages, including Italian and Spanish. These findings add to previous research which investigated the gender-congruency effect of inanimate nouns, where no effect of gender-congruent words was found. The results are discussed in relation to the null effect previously found for inanimate nouns. The comparison of the present and previous studies is motivated by a common linguistic distinction between animate and inanimate nouns in Hebrew, which ascribes grammatical gender specifications to derivational structures (for inanimate nouns) versus inflectional structures (for animate nouns). Given the difference in the notional meaning of gender specification for animate and inanimate nouns, the case of Hebrew exemplifies how language-specific characteristics, such as rich morphological structures, can be used by the linguistic system to express conceptual distinctions at the form-word level.

scholarly journals The gender congruency effect across languages in bilinguals: A meta-analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-693 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Rita Sá-Leite ◽  
Karlos Luna ◽  
Isabel Fraga ◽  
Montserrat Comesaña
Keyword(s):  
Congruency Effect ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Gender Congruency Effect

Simple and EuroWordNet

Terminology ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Vouros ◽  
Eugenia Eumeridou
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Bases ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Conceptual Systems ◽  
Major Objective ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Main Emphasis ◽  
Ontological Framework ◽  
Organizational Principles

Since concepts are the starting point of all terminological work, it follows that the development of a terminological base should place the main emphasis on the development of a conceptual system. The major objective of the PROMETHEUS project was the development of a generic ontological framework for the design of conceptual systems that would support searching, exploring and navigating multilingual terminological bases, at least for the European languages. Such a framework must provide the necessary semantic distinctions for structuring conceptual systems in specific domains in order to solve semantic problems inherent in linguistic ontologies and to provide a common ontological backbone for sharing and exploiting multilingual terminologies. The paper compares and reports on two well-established ontological frameworks for the development of multilingual resources for the European languages: EuroWordNet (EWN) and SIMPLE top ontologies. It investigates the correspondences between these frameworks, their underlying principles and their suitability to serve as organizational backbones in terminological knowledge bases. Finally, the paper concludes with a description of the implemenetation of the framework, which is based on the organizational principles underlying these multilingual resources.

The influence of grammatical gender and suffix transparency in processing Italian written nouns

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria De Martino ◽  
Giulia Bracco ◽  
Francesca Postiglione ◽  
Alessandro Laudanna
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Access ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Surface Form ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Default Option ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
Better Than

Abstract In some languages the grammatical gender of nouns can be probabilistically detected using formal cues; for instance, in Italian, the majority of feminine nouns end in ‘-a’(e.g., casa, ‘home’) and the majority of masculine nouns end in ‘-o’ (e.g., albero, ‘tree’). It has been hypothesized that the match/mismatch between the formal information of the suffix and the abstract grammatical information on gender affects lexical processing of nouns. An alternative account is that a default option available for gender poses constraints to mechanisms of lexical access for words exhibiting gender markers in the surface form. In the present study, nouns with highly predictive gender suffix (regular), nouns whose gender cannot be recovered from surface form (opaque) and nouns with misleading gender suffix (irregular) were compared in two reading aloud and two lexical decision experiments. Results confirmed that regular nouns are processed better than irregular nouns. No difference was detected between masculine and feminine opaque nouns. The results allow the conclusion that a formal gender feature (the gender orthographic regularity) is more likely to affect lexical processing of bare nouns than the activation of a gender default option.

scholarly journals Universal and particular in morphological processing: Evidence from Hebrew

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 1125-1133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Farhy ◽  
João Veríssimo ◽  
Harald Clahsen
Keyword(s):  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Masked Priming ◽  
Word Processor ◽  
Morphological Processing ◽  
Root Decomposition ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Complex Words ◽  
Open Class

Do properties of individual languages shape the mechanisms by which they are processed? By virtue of their non-concatenative morphological structure, the recognition of complex words in Semitic languages has been argued to rely strongly on morphological information and on decomposition into root and pattern constituents. Here, we report results from a masked priming experiment in Hebrew in which we contrasted verb forms belonging to two morphological classes, Paal and Piel, which display similar properties, but crucially differ on whether they are extended to novel verbs. Verbs from the open-class Piel elicited familiar root priming effects, but verbs from the closed-class Paal did not. Our findings indicate that, similarly to other (e.g., Indo-European) languages, down-to-the-root decomposition in Hebrew does not apply to stems of non-productive verbal classes. We conclude that the Semitic word processor is less unique than previously thought: Although it operates on morphological units that are combined in a non-linear way, it engages the same universal mechanisms of storage and computation as those seen in other languages.

‘Seeing’ is ‘trying’: The relation of visual perception to attemptive modality in the world's languages

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vitaly Voinov
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Related Notion ◽  
Serial Verbs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Body Metaphor ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Syntactic Context

AbstractThis paper examines the relationship between the concepts of ‘seeing’ and ‘attempting/trying’ in various languages. These concepts have so far been found to be co-lexified in languages spoken in Eurasia, Papua New Guinea, India and West Africa, with an added implicature of politeness present in some languages when this lexical item is used in directives. After establishing a cross-linguistic sample, the paper proposes a specific grammaticalization mechanism as responsible for producing this semantic relationship. The explanation centers on a process involving metaphorical transfer, the loss of semantic features, generalization, and a specific syntactic context conducive to this meaning shift. First, the Mind-as-Body metaphor is applied to the mind-related notion of ‘seeing an object’ to derive the body-related notion of ‘controlling an object’, as has previously been demonstrated to be the case in the history of certain Indo-European languages. Second, semantic bleaching causes the meaning component of physical sight to be lost from the overall meaning of the morpheme, and semantic generalization allows attempted actions to be mentally treated the same as physical objects that are manipulated. Finally, the context in which this meaning shift occurs is posited as constructions involving multiverbs, such as serial verbs or converbs.

Headless Relative Clauses in Yucatec Maya

2021 ◽  
pp. 444-474
Author(s):  
Scott AnderBois ◽  
Miguel Oscar Chan Dzul
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Indigenous Language ◽  
Yucatec Maya ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Free Relative ◽  
Syntactic Context

This chapter surveys headless relative clauses (i.e. ones with no overt head noun) in Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of southern Mexico. For Indo-European languages, discussion of such constructions has focused on “free relative clauses”—those with only a bare wh-word in place of a head—and to a lesser extent, “light-headed” relative clauses⎯those with a dedicated set of pronominal elements in place of a head noun. In contrast, Yucatec Maya is shown to allow for four different kinds of surface headless relative clause forms depending on the presence or absence of a wh-word and the presence or absence of a determiner, quantifier, or other D-element. With respect to free relative clauses, whereas many more well-studied Indo-European languages have morpho-syntactically distinct constructions for definite and indefinite free relative clauses (e.g. with an infinitive or subjunctive form in the latter case), Yucatec Maya is shown to have a single morpho-syntactic form whose (in)definiteness is determined by syntactic context.

scholarly journals The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
LUIS MORALES ◽  
DANIELA PAOLIERI ◽  
PAOLA E. DUSSIAS ◽  
JORGE R. VALDÉS KROFF ◽  
CHIP GERFEN ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Congruency Effect ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Language Activation ◽  
Cross Language ◽  
Gender Congruency Effect

We investigate the ‘gender-congruency’ effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian–Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / ‘find the scarf’) and clicked on the object named in the instruction. Grammatical gender of the objects’ name was manipulated so that pairs of objects had the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender in Italian, but gender in Spanish was always congruent. Results showed that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, looked at target objects less when they were incongruent in gender, suggesting a between-language gender competition effect. In addition, bilinguals looked at target objects more when the definite article in the spoken instructions provided a valid cue to anticipate its selection (different-gender condition). The temporal dynamics of gender processing and cross-language activation in bilinguals are discussed.

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