Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

Background: Vocabulary development is closely associated with morphological knowledge, yet work is needed to understand the mechanisms underpinning this relationship. One possibility is that because morphological relationships entail systematic mappings between word form (phonology and orthography) and word meaning (semantics and grammar),…

This paper is about identifying a nuance of social meaning which, I demonstrate, was conveyed in the Early and Late Modern period by the suffix "-oon." The history of non-native suffix "-oon" is presented by means of assembling non-native suffix "-oon" vocabulary in date order and sorting according to etymology. It…

Whether morpheme-based processing extends to relatively unproductive derived words remains a matter of debate. Although whole-word storage and access has been proposed for some derived words, such as Japanese de-adjectival nominals with the unproductive ("-mi") suffix (e.g., Hagiwara et al. in "Language" 75:739-763, 1999),…

This thesis presents an analysis of the system of transitivity, voice and valency alternations in Huasteco of San Luis Potosi (Mayan) within a functional-typological framework. The study is based on spoken discourse and elicited data collected in the municipalities of Aquismon and Tancanhuitz de Santos in the state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. The…

Adult Basic Education programs are under pressure to develop and deliver instruction that promotes rapid and sustained literacy development. We describe a novel approach to a literacy intervention that focuses on morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units contained in words. We argue that if you teach learners that big words are comprised…

In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a "morphologically transparent" way or in a "morphologically opaque" way…

This dissertation addresses a number of issues about the grammar of Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. Inuktitut is a dialect within the Inuit dialect continuum which is a group of languages/dialects within the Eskimo-Aleut language family. (Eastern Canadian Inuktitut has an ISO 693-3 language code of "ike".) Typologically, it is an ergative…

We examined whether French third- and fifth-grade children rely on morphemes when recognizing words and whether this reliance depends on word familiarity. We manipulated the presence of bases and suffixes in words and pseudowords to compare their contribution in a lexical decision task. Both bases and suffixes facilitated word reading accuracy and…

Despite longstanding arguments concerning the grammatical categories, functions, and status of the Korean and Japanese copulas within each language system, hardly any attention has been given to their comparative study. Researchers have asked about the function and status of the variant forms of the Japanese copula, and whether they should be…

A key question in language processing concerns the rule-like nature of many aspects of grammar. Much research on this topic has focused on English past tense morphology, which comprises a regular, rule-like pattern (e.g., bake-baked) and a set of irregular forms that defy a rule-based description (e.g., take-took). Previous studies have used past…

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of an intervention program aimed to improve reading and spelling ability through instruction in morphological awareness together with other forms of linguistic awareness, including knowledge of phonology, orthography, syntax, and semantics. Method: Sixteen children aged between 8;07 (years;months) and…

Purpose: This study examined whether lexical frequency, semantic knowledge, or sentence context affect children's production of primary stress in derived words with stress-changing suffixes (e.g., "-ity"). Method: Thirty children (M[subscript age] = 9;1 [years;months]) produced a limited set of high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) derived…

Phonological and semantic principles which underlie the derivation of verbs from nouns and adjectives in English are examined. There is intricate phonological conditioning for suffix "-ize" and for suffix "-(i)fy"; a third major process is zero derivation. These derivational processes cover more than a score of semantic relations (some with…

A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. The authors investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic and phonological…