Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.
Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore.
Mem Cognit. 2023 Apr;51(3):647-665. doi: 10.3758/s13421-022-01337-8. Epub 2022 Jun 15.
Morphological processing in visual word recognition has been extensively studied in a few languages, but other languages with interesting morphological systems have received little attention. Here, we examined Malay, an Austronesian language that is agglutinative. Agglutinative languages typically have a large number of morphemes per word. Our primary aim was to facilitate research on morphological processing in Malay by augmenting the Malay Lexicon Project (a database containing lexical information for almost 10,000 words) to include a breakdown of the words into morphemes as well as morphological properties for those morphemes. A secondary goal was to determine which morphological variables influence Malay word recognition. We collected lexical decision data for Malay words that had one prefix and one suffix, and first examined the predictive power of 15 morphological and four lexical variables on response times (RT). Of these variables, two lexical and three morphological variables emerged as strong predictors of RT. In GAMM models, we found a facilitatory effect of root family size, and inhibitory effects of prefix length and prefix percentage of more frequent words (PFMF) on RT. Next, we explored the interactions between overall word frequency and several of these predictors. Of particular interest, there was a significant word frequency by root family size interaction in which the effect of root family size is stronger for low-frequency words. We hope that this initial work on morphological processing in Malay inspires further research in this and other understudied languages, with the goal of developing a universal theory of morphological processing.
在少数几种语言中，人们对视觉词汇识别中的形态处理进行了广泛的研究，但其他具有有趣形态系统的语言却很少受到关注。在这里，我们研究了马来语，一种黏着语的澳斯特罗尼西亚语。黏着语通常一个词有很多语素。我们的主要目的是通过扩充马来语词汇项目（一个包含近 10000 个单词的词汇信息数据库）来促进马来语形态处理的研究，将单词分解为语素，并为这些语素提供形态属性。次要目的是确定哪些形态变量会影响马来语单词的识别。我们收集了带有一个前缀和一个后缀的马来语单词的词汇决策数据，首先检查了 15 个形态和 4 个词汇变量对反应时间（RT）的预测能力。在这些变量中，有两个词汇变量和三个形态变量是 RT 的强有力预测因子。在 GAMM 模型中，我们发现根词族大小对 RT 有促进作用，前缀长度和前缀更频繁词的百分比（PFMF）对 RT 有抑制作用。接下来，我们探索了这些预测因子与整体词频之间的相互作用。特别有趣的是，在词频与根词族大小的交互作用中，根词族大小的作用在低频词中更强。我们希望，这项关于马来语形态处理的初步工作能够激发对这门语言和其他研究较少的语言的进一步研究，目标是建立一种普遍的形态处理理论。
