Lexical stock under scrutiny: exploring the mental representations of morphologically complex structures
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Date
2014-10-22
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Abstract
The following paper is devoted to the exploration of morphological relations
between mental representations of words and their textual realisations. The ability to
read written texts has accompanied humans for about six thousand years as opposed to
the spoken language which is said to be the more natural mean of communication with
a history of about six million years. Both ways of communication have appreciated
a long standing tradition, however psycholinguistic research delving into the former
phenomenon seems not to have been sufficient to uncover most of its peculiarities. This
paper deals with the phenomenon of visual word recognition yet by no means is it
thought to exhaust the subject. It has been divided into the following three parts.
The first chapter deals mainly with the theoretical approaches to the way humans
are able to recognise written texts. Various plausible processes operating at the level of
meaning retrieval from the written text are presented. Moreover, factors determining the
speed and quality of word recognition are briefly expanded upon. The subsequent part
of the present work attempts to provide a concise account of the dominating models of
visual word recognition both those which incorporate the role of morphology and those
which do not. Additionally, the evolution together with the most recent formulation of
the idea of the mental lexicon is explicated.
The ultimate part of the paper concentrates on the empirical study which was
carried out for the purpose of this thesis. It was modelled on (Pilon 1998) and aimed at
verifying the pseudoprefixation hypothesis. The benefit of having a model experiment is
that the results of the two studies can be contrasted thus lifting the veil of secrecy on the
role of morphology in visual word recognition. The assumption put forward is that if the
phenomenon of pseudoprefixation exists the role of morphology in visual word recognition
should be acknowledged.
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Keywords
psycholinguistics, word recognition, morphology, mental lexicon