Open AccessConstituent‐morpheme priming: Implications from the morphology of two‐kanji compound words
Author(s) -
Joyce Terry
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
japanese psychological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.392
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5884
pISSN - 0021-5368
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5884.00009
Subject(s) - morpheme , mental lexicon , kanji , compound , facilitation , lexicon , psychology , suffix , priming (agriculture) , lemma (botany) , linguistics , affix , word formation , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , chinese characters , neuroscience , ecology , philosophy , botany , germination , poaceae , biology
The diversity in the morphological structure of two‐kanji compound words is a matter of special concern for models of the Japanese mental lexicon. This study discusses two proposals for models of the Japanese mental lexicon –Hirose’s (1992, 1994, 1996) hypotheses and a Japanese lemma‐unit version of the multilevel interactive‐activation framework – in terms of their ability to cope with this diversity. As the proposals make different predictions concerning constituent‐morpheme priming, patterns of facilitation were examined in two experiments with five word‐formation principles as experimental conditions. Experiment 1, using the long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 3000 ms employed by Hirose (1992), only found significant differences between the first‐ and second‐element conditions in one of the word‐formation conditions. Experiment 2, using a short SOA of 250 ms, confirmed the pattern of priming obtained in Experiment 1. These results are more consistent with the prediction from the Japanese lemma‐unit model.