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Organising principles in lexical representation: Evidence from Polish.
Authors:
Reid, A.A, & Marslen-Wilson, W.D.
Reference:
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 387-392), The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Year of publication:
2000
CBU number:
4190
Abstract:
Cross-linguistic research into the structure of the mental lexicon potentially allows us to deconfound factors which are language specific from factors which are cross-linguistically universal. In a series of three experiments we provide preliminary evidence for the structure of the Polish lexicon, which belongs to the Slavonic language family. As in English, semantic compositionality plays a crucial role, so that semantically compositional, morphologically complex words are stored in a combinatorial fashion, and semantically opaque words seem to be represented as full forms. At the same time, clear evidence is found for priming between derivational and inflectional affixes, and for interference effects between suffixed words competing for the same underlying stem. Overall the data support a combinatorial and decompositional approach to lexical representation.
