MORPHOLOGY & THE MENTAL LEXICON DAY 25 – OCT 25, 2013 Brain & Language LING 4110-4890-5110-7960...

MORPHOLOGY & THE MENTAL LEXICONDAY 25 – OCT 25, 2013

Brain & Language

LING 4110-4890-5110-7960

NSCI 4110-4891-6110

Harry Howard

Tulane University

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Course organization• The syllabus, these slides and my recordings are

available at http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LING4110/.• If you want to learn more about EEG and neurolinguistics,

you are welcome to participate in my lab. This is also a good way to get started on an honor's thesis.

• The grades are posted to Blackboard.

10/25/13 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University

http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LING4110/

REVIEW

10/25/13 Brain & Language - Harry Howard - Tulane University 3

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Summary of lateralization of phonology

LH, small window of temporal integration

RH, large window of temporal integration

high temporal frequency:rapid cues, like stops

low temporal frequency: slow cues, like vowels

high spectral frequency: formants

low spectral frequency: fundamental

categorical distinctions: lexical, phrasal, clausal stress;lexical tone in Thai/Chinese

graded/coordinate distinctions:emotional intonation,sentence type?


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A theory of how the brain works• The five theories of the lateralization of phonology that we

have reviewed gradually converge towards lateralization as a kind of calculation or computation.


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A neuron as a computation, if not a calculation


axon

dendrite adendrite bdendrite cdendrite d

MORPHOLOGY & THE MENTAL LEXICONIngram: III. Lexical semantics, §9.


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Linguistic model, Fig. 2.1 p. 37


Discourse model

SyntaxSentence prosody

MorphologyWord prosody

Segmental phonologyperception

Acoustic phonetics Feature extraction

Segmental phonologyproduction

Articulatory phonetics Speech motor control

INPUT

SEMANTICS

Sentence level

Word level

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Dual-route model


phonological input

/di.paɹ.tɪd/ /wɪnt/

meaning

verb + past tense

morphological analysis

/di.paɹ.t + ɪd/

com

posi

tiona

l rou

te lexical route

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What is a word?• Phonologically

• a spike in the level of uncertainty as to what the next sound will be• d• o• g• ?

• Semantically• that is the topic of this chapter


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Morphological decomposition• Recall that words can be analyzed in terms of inflection &

derivation• inflection: cats > cat+s, sleeping > sleep+ing• derivation: government > govern+ment

• argument• detriment• department


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Form-frequency relations in English past tenseTable 1.9

Basic form Past tense Occurrence in speech Morphological type

go went high token frequency suppletive

leave left mid token frequency partially regular

depart departed low token frequency (fully) regular


These relations generalize to other morphemes and other languages, eg. tack~tacks, knife~knives, ox~oxen.

Can one learning model account for all three, or is a dual-route model necessary, or perhaps even a triple-route model?

What does ‘to prime the pump’ mean?

• What is priming in psychology?

• ‘the facilitatory effect that presentation of an item can have on the response to a subsequent item’

• usually measured in terms of reaction time


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An example of primingTable 9.2

Conditions prime ~ probe Priming effect

[+morph, +phon] friendly ~ friend yes

[+morph, –phon] elusive ~ elude yes

[+morph, –phon] serenity ~ serene yes

[–morph, +phon] tinsel ~ tin no


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What causes the priming effect?Table 9.3


[–sem, +morph] casualty ~ casual no

[+sem, +morph] punishment ~ punish yes

[+sem, –morph, –phon] idea ~ notion yes

[–sem, –morph, +phon] bulletin ~ bullet no


Answer: The semantic relationship.

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What causes the priming effect?Table 9.4


1. [–sem, +morph] casualty ~ casual no

2. [+sem, +morph] punishment ~ punish yes

3. [–sem, +morph] successful ~ successor no

4. [+sem, +morph] confession ~ confessor no

5. [–sem, +morph] restrain ~ strain no

6. [+sem, +morph] insincere ~ sincere yes

7. [–sem, +morph] depress ~ express no

8. [+sem, +morph] unfasten ~ refasten yes


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A little too early• The previous experiment suggests that prefixes and

suffixes are processed differently.• I want to introduce a model of word semantics first, and then we

will return to this issue.

• Ingram has a good summary of a PET and a MEG experiment on morphological processing.• MEG is more informative, but to understand the results, we need to

wait until we have discussed Broca’s area.


NEXT TIMEQ7

Start word semantics


MORPHOLOGY & THE MENTAL LEXICON DAY 25 – OCT 25, 2013 Brain & Language LING 4110-4890-5110-7960...

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