The representation of plural inflectional affixes in English: evidence from priming in an auditory lexical decision task

ABSTRACT

The representation of inflection is controversial: theories of morphological processing range from those that treat all inflectional morphemes as independently represented in memory to those that deny independent representation for any inflectional morphemes. Whereas identity priming for stems and derivational affixes is regularly reported, priming of inflectional affixes is understudied and has produced no clear consensus. This paper reports results from a continuous auditory lexical decision task investigating priming of plural inflectional affixes in English, in plural prime-target pairs such as crimes$\to$trees. Our results show statistically significant priming facilitation for plural primes relative to phonological (cleanse$\to$trees) and singular (crime$\to$trees) controls. This finding indicates that inflectional affixes, like lexical stems, exhibit identity priming effects. We discuss implications for morphological theory and point to questions for further work addressing which representation(s) produce the priming effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Morphology
• inflection
• identity priming
• lexical decision
• auditory morphological processing

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, Ava Creemers, Florian Schwarz, Linnaea Stockall, Meredith Tamminga, Robert J. Wilder, Jérémy Zehr, and the FMART/XMORPH reading groups at Penn for their input to this project. We also acknowledge helpful feedback from several anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Amy Goodwin Davies http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2942-4654

Notes

1 This study is also discussed in Goodwin Davies (2018).

2 Some of these reasons are specific to inflectional affixes; others also apply to derivational affixes in comparison to lexical stems.

3 For example, /wɔks/ in “these walks are…”, “she walks…”, “this walk's highlight is…”, and “this walk's fun…”.

4 Data and analyses available here: GITHUB.COM/AMYGOOD/INFL-PRIME

5 We specified a 15 ms average speed-up for targets in the plural condition compared to the singular control condition. This was selected as a lower bound because in the means per condition of the pilot data, the plural condition was 17.4 ms faster than the phonological control condition and 15.9 ms faster than the singular control condition.

6 https://aspredicted.org/c3dw4.pdf.

7 This is the base 10 log of the number of films in which a word appears in a database of 8388 films, +1.

8 Word-word, word-nonword, nonword-nonword, and nonword-word.

9 The reference level was the plural prime. For this reason, the β values are positive, indicating that the controls are slower.

10 These studies, although similar, have some important differences. For example, in the current study, the critical prime$\to$target structure is [STEM${}_1$][affix${}_1$]$\to$[STEM${}_2$][affix${}_1$] (e.g., crimes$\to$trees) with the repeated unit occurring with different non-repeated units in both prime and target. In contrast, in the relevant stimuli from Wilder et al. (2019), the structure is [stem${}_1$][AFFIX${}_1$]$\to$[stem${}_1$] (e.g., frogs$\to$frog) with the repeated unit occurring in isolation in the target. A more directly comparable stem priming prime$\to$target structure would be [stem${}_1$][AFFIX${}_1$]$\to$[stem${}_1$][AFFIX${}_2$] (e.g., walks$\to$walked). Still greater comparability would be achieved if the linear order of repeated versus non-repeated unit was controlled across stem priming and affix priming stimuli, e.g., [AFFIX${}_1$][stem${}_1$]$\to$[AFFIX${}_2$][stem${}_1$] and [STEM${}_1$][affix${}_1$]$\to$[STEM${}_2$][affix${}_1$].

11 For example, focussing on duration (one aspect of prosodic strength): If we were to consider a priming effect as percentage speed-up across the duration of a stem/affix, we find similar effect sizes for affix priming in the current study and stem priming in Wilder et al. (2019). For the 36 plural targets in this study, the mean duration of the affix was approximately 200 ms. As such, a 29 ms increase indicates an approximately 15% facilitation across the duration of the affix. This is similar to the percentage speed-up observed across the duration of the stem for plural$\to$singular (e.g., frogs$\to$frog) priming at an immediate distance in Wilder et al. 2019, where speed-up was 11% and 15% in Experiments 1 and 2 respectively.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health Grant No. R01HD073258.