Transcript UNIVERSITY SKILLS 101 - University of Ottawa

Morphological Priming without
Morphological Relationship
by Catherine-Marie Longtin, Juan Segui, and Pierre A.
Halle´ Laboratoire de Psychologie Expe´rimentale,
CNRS, Universite´ Rene´ Descartes, BoulogneBillancourt, France
Presented by Jaber Maslamani
LIN 7901 Psycholinguistics
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
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Background:
 Multiple studies have tried to
understand the role of morphology in
processing of multi-morphemic words.
This particular study is about French and
the processing of simple and complex
French words.
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Previous studies (like Marslen-Wilson et al. 1994)
showed that English semantically transparent words
primed their base (government primes govern) but
that semantically opaque words do not (apartment
does not prime apart).
Possible conclusion: opaque words are probably
stored as a whole unit, and transparent words are
probably stored each morpheme separately.
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But a study by Frost et. al (1997) showed
that for Hebrew, such an effect did not occur,
and therefore that conclusion may not be
valid.
 These two studies used different
experimental techniques and different
languages, so it is hard to say why they had
different results. (The Marslen-Wilson study
used audio primes, and the Frost study used
visual primes).
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Studies following up on this found
that the effect were probably due to
language. There are on one hand
languages like Hebrew or Arabic with
non-concatenative morphology, and on
the other hand languages like English
with concatenative morphology.
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Examples from non-concatenative
Arabic morphology
the Arabic root k-t-b can have different but
semantically-related meanings. Thus,
[katab] ‘he wrote’,
[kita:b] ‘book’,
[kutub] ‘books’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconcatenative_morphology
[maktaba] ‘library’
[kutayyeb] ‘booklet’
all come from the root k-t-b.
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This study
 This study uses French, since French
morphology is concatenative like
English.
 The study has 2 experiments, one with
only visual primes and one with audio
primes.
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Further, there are 4
conditions/types of pairs:
1. semantically transparent pairs
2. semantically opaque pairs
3. pseudo-derived pairs
4. orthographic pairs
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Goal of the study
 The study aims at assessing the role of
semantic transparency in French and in
particular to establish whether pseudoderived words are processed in the same
way as opaque words or as orthographic
controls are .
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Explantion of pairs:
In each of the two experiments, there
was a prime and a target. The prime
carried some kind of morphology which
the target lacked. The exception is the
orthographic pairs, in which the prime
did not have a real suffix from the
language.
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1. Semantically transparent pairs:
 They are those pairs that have some very
obvious relationship (they are semantically
and etymologically related).
EXAMPLES:
Ex1. gaufrette/GAUFRE (wafer/waffle) or
Ex2. rondelle/ROND (puck/round).
English equivalent would be booklet/book.
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2. Semantically opaque pairs:
 They bore some relationship to each other
at some point in the language, but that
relationship is no longer obvious (so they are
etymologically but not semantically related).
EXAMPLES:
Ex1. lunette/LUNE (glasses/moon) or
Ex2. cannelle/CANNE (cinammon/cane)
English equivalent would be question/quest .
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3. Pseudo-derived pairs:
 They have no semantic relationship. The
prime could be interpreted as morphologically
complex, because it ends in a French suffix,
but which is not acting as a suffix here.
EXAMPLES:
Ex1. coupable/COUPER (guilty/to cut) or
Ex2. traiter/TRAIT (to treat/a feature).
English equivalent would be final/fine (vs.
dismissal/dismiss, where the -al is acting
morphologically).
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4. Orthographic pairs:
 They are pairs that have no semantic relationship,
but share some spelling. Unlike the pseudo-derived
pairs, the prime does not have a morphological
ending; it cannot be decomposed.
EXAMPLES:
Ex1. abricot/ABRI (apricot/shelter, -cot is not a
French suffix) or
Ex2. auberge/AUBE (hotel/dawn, -erge is not a
French suffix).
English equivalent would be pillow/pill (because
-ow is not an English suffix). Since there will be no
priming, this is the control condition.
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Le Nouveau Petit Robert Dictionary
by Rey-Debove, J., & Rey, A. (1993) was
used to ascertain the semantic
relationships between words.
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Experiment 1:
Visual Masked Priming
(visual prime/visual target)
 Participants: 43 French speaking student
from France, although several had to be
rejected because of high error rates, or very
slow 'yes' response times. The final number of
36 participants.
 Targets: were totally 240 targets, 120 of
which were word targets, and 120 were
nonword targets.
 There was an a training session of 20 trials.
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Procedure:
For each trial, subjects saw a pre-mask of
######### in the middle of the screen for
500ms. Then the prime would appear for only
46ms, masked immediately by the target,
which appeared for 3000ms, or until there
was a response.
 Using DMDX, participants were to decide if
the word they saw was a word of French or
not. They were not told of the prime.
Each trial lasted 12 minutes.
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Results of Experiment 1:
Priming had a significant overall
effect. Responses were faster in all
conditions except the orthographic
pairs.
This shows that in French there is no
effect of semantic opacity on priming,
because the opaque and pseudo-derived
pairs had the same effect as the
transparent pairs, not the orthographic
pairs.
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Experiment 2:
Auditory-Visual Cross-Modal Priming
(auditory prime/visual target)
 The materials and the design of this
experiment were the same as
Experiment 1. This time the prime would
be an auditory stimulus, and the target
would be visual. The auditory stimuli for
this were recorded by a native speaker
of Canadian French.
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Participants: 37 students, native speakers
of Canadian French, four of whom had to be
excluded because of slow response times,
leaving 33.
Procedure: Each trial began with a big (+)
in the middle of the screen for 500ms,
followed by the audio prime. The visual
target was displayed on screen at the end of
the sound. It remained for 1500ms, or until a
response was given. Again, participants were
told to press a button if the string of letters
on screen was a French word, and another
button if not.
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Results of Experiment 2:
Priming had no significant effect overall,
and only the transparent pairs showed any
effect of priming
The researchers say this confirms that
opaque and pseudo-derived pairs are
processed the same way, since they showed
the same effects of priming.
It also confirms that semantic transparency
plays a central role in the cross-modal
paradigm for languages have nonconcatenative morphology.
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General Discussion & Conclusions
 There were quite different results for the
experiments. In visual masked priming, there
was facilitation for all the pairs except
orthographic. In the cross-modal experiment,
there was only facilitation for the semantically
transparent pairs.
 The results of the masked priming
experiment suggest that two words sharing the
same root morphemes prime each other,
whether they share the same meaning or not.
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Morphemic composition in French is not as salient as
in some other languages (such as Hebrew).
For example, in the cross-modal experiment, there
was no priming effect in the opaque or pseudoderived pairs in French, but research in Hebrew has
shown this effect.
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 Another issue to be investigated is the role
of productivity of the morphemes. Is there any
effect of affixes that are very common in the
language versus very rare in the language?
 This may have to do with how
morphologically rich the language is.

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 Marslen-Wilson (2001) proposed a continuum of
languages from morphologically rich ones (Hebrew &
Arabic) to morphologically poor ones (like Mandarin
Chinese). French falls closer to the Hebrew end of
things.
In these languages, perhaps morphological priming
without true morphological relationships may be due
to the richness of the languages' system.
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Thank you
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