Wynne Hilary S Z, Zhou Beinan, Kotzor Sandra, Lahiri Aditi
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2025 Nov;264:106196. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106196. Epub 2025 Jul 1.
The view that morphologically complex words are decomposed into constituent morphemes during lexical access has gained traction in the psycholinguistic literature, which in turn has had significant implications for theories of lexical organisation and processing. Nevertheless, the bulk of evidence for how morphologically complex Indo-European words are accessed and stored is based on based on Latinate scripts, where the orthography tends to be sequential. In many languages however, it is not straightforward to determine the internal structure of the word from the script alone. To critically examine the morphological decomposition in the visual domain, we present results from a visual delayed priming study covering every possible combination of morphologically complex words (i.e. stem ∼ prefixed, stem ∼ suffixed, prefixed - prefixed, suffixed - suffixed, and prefixed ∼ suffixed) in Bengali, a language rich with derivational morphology and orthographic complexity. Results for configurations containing stems (stem ∼ affixed) showed the only priming effects in the study; crucially, these findings depended heavily on whether the prime was a stem or affixed word. When the prime was a stem word, responses to both prefixed and suffixed targets were facilitated to a similar degree. When the primes consisted of affixed words (either prefixed or suffixed), they did not reliably prime stem targets. We also tested relationships between all affixed words and found no reliable priming effect for any combination. We argue that our results reflect not only modality-specific aspects of processing, but also asymmetries in the orthographic significance of phonological processes occurring at the stem-affix boundaries in Bengali.
在词汇提取过程中，形态复杂的单词会被分解为组成语素的观点在心理语言学文献中得到了广泛认可，这反过来又对词汇组织和加工理论产生了重大影响。然而，关于形态复杂的印欧语系单词是如何被提取和存储的大部分证据，都是基于拉丁文字体系，在这种体系中，正字法往往是按顺序排列的。然而，在许多语言中，仅从文字本身来确定单词的内部结构并非易事。为了批判性地检验视觉领域中的形态分解，我们展示了一项视觉延迟启动研究的结果，该研究涵盖了孟加拉语中形态复杂单词的每一种可能组合（即词干～前缀、词干～后缀、前缀 - 前缀、后缀 - 后缀以及前缀～后缀），孟加拉语是一种具有丰富派生形态和正字法复杂性的语言。包含词干（词干～附加成分）的结构的结果显示了该研究中唯一的启动效应；至关重要的是，这些发现很大程度上取决于启动刺激是词干还是附加成分单词。当启动刺激是词干单词时，对前缀和后缀目标的反应得到了相似程度的促进。当启动刺激由附加成分单词（前缀或后缀）组成时，它们并不能可靠地启动词干目标。我们还测试了所有附加成分单词之间的关系，发现任何组合都没有可靠的启动效应。我们认为，我们的结果不仅反映了加工过程中特定模态的方面，还反映出孟加拉语中词干 - 词缀边界处发生的语音过程在正字法意义上的不对称性。
