Morphological errors and the representation of morphology in the lexical—semantic system

1994 ◽  
Vol 346 (1315) ◽  
pp. 79-87 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Information ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Derivational Morphology ◽  
Semantic System ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Base Form ◽  
Semantic Errors

Neuropsychological studies support the hypothesis that morphology is represented autonomously, both at the level of word meaning and at the level of word form. In output processes, morphologically organized semantic information activates lexical representations of roots and affixes, which are composed before production. In input processes, the stimulus is parsed along the morphological dimension, to access root and affix lexical representations, which in turn activate morphologically organized semantic information. Inflectional and derivational morphology are represented independently in the lexicon. Inflected words are fully decomposed; derived words are decomposed into base form + inflection. In aphasia, morphological errors in transcoding tasks always co-occur with semantic and/or phonemic errors. Morphological errors in transcoding tasks require combined damage to morphological representations in the semantic—lexical system and to sublexical conversion procedures; they co-occur with semantic errors when also root representations are damaged. The co-occurrence of morphological and phonemic errors can be accounted for by several hypotheses, but its theoretical meaning is still uncertain.

scholarly journals The Neural Underpinnings of Processing Newly Taught Semantic Information: The Role of Retrieval Practice

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Eileen Haebig ◽  
Laurence B. Leonard ◽  
Patricia Deevy ◽  
Jennifer Schumaker ◽  
Jeffrey D. Karpicke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Children ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Retrieval Practice ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Semantic Feature ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Spaced Retrieval ◽  
Children’S Learning ◽  
Children's Learning

Purpose Recent behavioral studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of implementing retrieval practice into learning tasks for children. Such approaches have revealed that repeated spaced retrieval (RSR) is particularly effective in promoting children's learning of word form and meaning information. This study further examines how retrieval practice enhances learning of word meaning information at the behavioral and neural levels. Method Twenty typically developing preschool children were taught novel words using an RSR learning schedule for some words and an immediate retrieval (IR) learning schedule for other words. In addition to the label, children were taught two arbitrary semantic features for each item. Following the teaching phase, children's learning was tested using recall tests. In addition, during the 1-week follow-up, children were presented with pictures and an auditory sentence that correctly labeled the item but stated correct or incorrect semantic information. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were time locked to the onset of the words noting the semantic feature. Children provided verbal judgments of whether the semantic feature was correctly paired with the item. Results Children recalled more labels and semantic features for items that had been taught in the RSR learning schedule relative to the IR learning schedule. ERPs also differentiated the learning schedules. Mismatching label–meaning pairings elicited an N400 and late positive component (LPC) for both learning conditions; however, mismatching RSR pairs elicited an N400 with an earlier onset and an LPC with a longer duration, relative to IR mismatching label–meaning pairings. These ERP timing differences indicated that the children were more efficient in processing words that were taught in the RSR schedule relative to the IR learning schedule. Conclusions Spaced retrieval practice promotes learning of both word form and meaning information. The findings lay the necessary groundwork for better understanding of processing newly learned semantic information in preschool children. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.15063060

scholarly journals On visual access to letter case and lexical/semantic information

1985 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 392-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd L. Avant ◽  
Alice A. Thieman
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Information ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Visual Access ◽  
Letter Case

The time-course of morphosyntactic and semantic priming in late bilinguals: A study of German adjectives

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
SINA BOSCH ◽  
HELENA KRAUSE ◽  
ALINA LEMINEN
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Temporal Dynamics ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Behavioral Experiment ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Brain Responses ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Spatially Extended

How do late proficient bilinguals process morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in their non-native language (L2)? How is this information represented in the L2 mental lexicon? And what are the neural signatures of L2 morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic processing? We addressed these questions in one behavioral and two ERP priming experiments on inflected German adjectives testing a group of advanced late Russian learners of German in comparison to native speaker (L1) controls. While in the behavioral experiment, the L2 learners performed native-like, the ERP data revealed clear L1/L2 differences with respect to the temporal dynamics of grammatical processing. Specifically, our results show that L2 morphosyntactic processing yielded temporally and spatially extended brain responses relative to L1 processing, indicating that grammatical processing of inflected words in an L2 is more demanding and less automatic than in the L1. However, this group of advanced L2 learners showed native-like lexical-semantic processing.

An exploratory study of linguistic–colour associations across languages in multilingual synaesthetes

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (7) ◽  
pp. 1343-1355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kylie J. Barnett ◽  
Joanne Feeney ◽  
Michael Gormley ◽  
Fiona N. Newell
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Visual Structure ◽  
Visual Properties

In one of the most common forms of synaesthesia, linguistic–colour synaesthesia, colour is induced by stimuli such as numbers, letters, days of the week, and months of the year. It is not clear, however, whether linguistic–colour synaesthesia is determined more by higher level semantic information—that is, word meaning—or by lower level grapheme or phoneme structure. To explore this issue, we tested whether colour is consistently induced by grapheme or phoneme form or word meaning in bilingual and trilingual linguistic–colour synaesthetes. We reasoned that if the induced colour was related to word meaning, rather than to the acoustic or visual properties of the words, then the induced colours would remain consistent across languages. We found that colours were not consistently related to word meaning across languages. Instead, induced colours were more related to form properties of the word across languages, particularly visual structure. However, the type of inducing stimulus influenced specific colour associations. For example, colours to months of the year were more consistent across languages than were colours to numbers or days of the week. Furthermore, the effect of inducing stimuli was also associated with the age of acquisition of additional languages. Our findings are discussed with reference to a critical period in language acquisition on synaesthesia.

scholarly journals Lexicon and rhetoric in Fet's translation of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 121-154
Author(s):  
Emily Klenin
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Information ◽  
Local Domain ◽  
Partial Loss ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Important Material ◽  
Early School ◽  
Small Domain ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
School Training

A. A. Fet's translation of J. W. Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea is an important early example of Fet's lifelong practice as a translator and attests to his well-known fidelity to his source texts. His strongest preference is to maintain the versification characteristics of his source, but the degree of his lexical-semantic fidelity is also very strong and far outranks fidelity on other levels (phonetic, grammatical). The poet evidently translated holistically within very small textual domains, within which he sometimes isolated pivots of core semantic information (which he located in translation as they were in the original), around which less important material was fitted, insofar as space permitted. In Fet's text, versification limitations sometimes led to lexical-semantic mismatches of semantic denotation, and these mismatches are characterized in the paper: they typically involve repetitions, repeated mentions, or known information, and the mismatch may entail full or partial loss or enrichment of the semantics of the original. In addition, conflicts sometimes arise between denotative requirements within the local domain and the cumulative (usually connotative) associations generated across the larger domain of the whole text. When such conflicts arise, Fet resolves them in favour of small-domain accuracy, resulting in semantic changes ('shifts') in the domain of the poetic text, which thereby loses some rhetorical or poetic force, relative to the original. Dissonance between large- and smalldomain semantics is often inevitable, because of the language-specific nature of connotation. To the extent that the semantics of Fet's translation are a consequence of his personal preferences, they may be viewed in the context of, first, his early school training (not far behind him when he translated Hermann und Dorothea) and, second, his status as both professional poet, writing in Russian, and educated native German-Russian bilingual.

Morpheme recognition and the learning of rules for derivational morphology

1976 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Derwing
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Language Learner ◽  
Derivational Morphology ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Linguistic Description ◽  
Phonological Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
Morphological Relationship

Derivational morphology is one of the most difficult and least studied of all the areas of linguistic description (cf. Lightner, 1968:71). There are two main problems which are largely responsible for this. The first is the question of morpheme recognition or lexical identity: how similar in meaning or in sound do two words have to be in order for the linguist or language learner to identify a common morphemic unit and thus to see a morphological relationship between the words? (This problem is discussed in detail in Derwing, 1973: 122-6.) Many of the morphological rules which are proposed by linguists, whether morphophonemic or phonotactic in presumed character, are posited primarily, if not solely, in order to capture certain kinds of supposed ‘lexical redundancies,’ i.e., systematic variations which appear in the phonological form of the same morpheme when the morpheme occurs in different syntactic constructions. The viability of all such rules is thus directly contingent upon the assumption that the words involved do, in fact, share a common morpheme. Consider, for example, the morphophonemic rule which Chomsky proposes for English which changes a /d/ to an /s/ before the suffix /lv/, and the phonotactic rule which changes a /d/ plus /i/ or /y/ into a /ž/ before a vowel (1964:90); both of these rules are motivated by the presumed fact that the English words decisive and decision, for example, contain in their ‘underlying’ or ‘lexical’ representations the common morpheme decide. But how does one decide whether this claim is justified for ordinary native speakers of the language, particularly in some of the more problematical cases discussed in Derwing (1973)?

scholarly journals Semantic and lexical features of words dissimilarly affected by non-fluent, logopenic, and semantic primary progressive aphasia

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (10) ◽  
pp. 1011-1022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jet M. J. Vonk ◽  
Roel Jonkers ◽  
H. Isabel Hubbard ◽  
Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini ◽  
Adam M. Brickman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Mental Lexicon ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Lexical Frequency ◽  
Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Primary Progressive ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Psycholinguistic Variables

AbstractObjective:To determine the effect of three psycholinguistic variables—lexical frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and neighborhood density (ND)—on lexical-semantic processing in individuals with non-fluent (nfvPPA), logopenic (lvPPA), and semantic primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). Identifying the scope and independence of these features can provide valuable information about the organization of words in our mind and brain.Method:We administered a lexical decision task—with words carefully selected to permit distinguishing lexical frequency, AoA, and orthographic ND effects—to 41 individuals with PPA (13 nfvPPA, 14 lvPPA, 14 svPPA) and 25 controls.Results:Of the psycholinguistic variables studied, lexical frequency had the largest influence on lexical-semantic processing, but AoA and ND also played an independent role. The results reflect a brain-language relationship with different proportional effects of frequency, AoA, and ND in the PPA variants, in a pattern that is consistent with the organization of the mental lexicon. Individuals with nfvPPA and lvPPA experienced an ND effect consistent with the role of inferior frontal and temporoparietal regions in lexical analysis and word form processing. By contrast, individuals with svPPA experienced an AoA effect consistent with the role of the anterior temporal lobe in semantic processing.Conclusions:The findings are in line with a hierarchical mental lexicon structure with a conceptual (semantic) and a lexeme (word-form) level, such that a selective deficit at one of these levels of the mental lexicon manifests differently in lexical-semantic processing performance, consistent with the affected language-specific brain region in each PPA variant.

Semantics and morphosyntax in predictive L2 sentence processing

2015 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Hopp
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Lower Sensitivity ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
L2 Processing ◽  
Verb Semantics ◽  
Anticipatory Processing ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
L1 English

AbstractIn the context of current approaches to anticipation in native and non-native sentence processing, this paper investigates whether late second-language (L2) learners integrate morphosyntax, i.e. case marking, and verb semantics to generate anticipations in L2 sentence comprehension. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment with 45 L1 English L2 learners of German and 12 German natives, German natives are found to integrate morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in anticipatory processing, while L2 learners only rely on lexical-semantic information for prediction. Moreover, there is no indication that increasing proficiency leads to the involvement of morphosyntax in predictive L2 processing. We discuss reasons for the lower sensitivity to morphosyntax in anticipatory L2 sentence processing.

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