Frequency effects in the production of Dutch deverbal adjectives and inflected verbs

Abstract

In two experiments, we studied the role of frequency information in the production of deverbal adjectives and inflected verbs in Dutch. Naming latencies were triggered in a position–response association task and analysed using stepwise mixed-effects modelling, with subject and word as crossed random effects. The production latency of deverbal adjectives was affected by the cumulative frequencies of their verbal stems, arguing for decomposition and against full listing. However, for the inflected verbs, there was an inhibitory effect of Inflectional Entropy, and a nonlinear effect of Lemma Frequency. Additional effects of Position-specific Neighbourhood Density and Cohort Entropy in both types of words underline the importance of paradigmatic relations in the mental lexicon. Taken together, the data suggest that the word-form level does neither contain full forms nor strictly separated morphemes, but rather morphemes with links to phonologically and—in case of inflected verbs—morphologically related word forms.

Keywords:

• Production
• Morphology
• Frequencies
• Form level

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Pienie Zwitserlood for valuable discussion.

Notes

¹Next to a U-shaped effect of compound frequency there were facilitative effects of both the Left and the Right Positional Entropy (i.e., Shannon's entropy in a set of compounds sharing the left (or right) constituent). We will explain these entropy measures further below.

²In factorial variables, one level is modelled to lie on the intercept. Table 2 lists the adjustment(s) for the other level(s).