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Inflectional morphology in the French mental lexicon
Authors:
Meunier, F. & MARSLEN-WILSON, W.D.
Reference:
In A. Vandierendonck, M. Brysbaert & K. Van Der Goten (Eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, p. 188, Escop/Academia Press.
Year of publication:
1999
CBU number:
5021
Abstract:
Can regular and irregular verb forms be accommodated by a single representational mechanism or is a dual mechanism ac-count required? We used a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm to investigate the mental representation of regular and irregular verb forms in French. We contrasted four types of French verbs, varying in the phonological and morphological regularity of their verb form inflection. These were (i) regular verbs (aimons/aimer) (ii) verbs that undergo predictable phonological changes (sèment/semer) (iii) verbs to which subrules apply (teignent/teindre) and (iv) irregular verbs with idiosyncratic alternations (vont/aller). The infinitive forms of these verbs were presented as target in three prime conditions: preceded either by a regular form, an irregular/modified form, or a control unrelated prime. Morphologically related primes, whether regular or irregular, significantly facilitated lexical decision responses for all four verb classes. These results contrasted with English, where regularly inflected verbs prime their stems but irregular verbs do not. We argue that the pattern observed in French reflects the decomposability of French irregular forms.
