Lexicon Organization: How are words stored? Atomist view  Words are stored in their full inflected form  talk –> talk  talked –> talked  toothbrush –> toothbrush But:  Big memory load  Novel forms  Lack of relatedness talk vs talked = talk vs mince Decompositional view  Words are generated of morphemes that are stored in the lexicon  talk –> talk  talked –> talk + -ed  toothbrush –> tooth + brush But:  Irregular forms taught –> teach + -ed ?  Meaning of opaque compounds quarterback –> quarter + back ? Vacation <> vacate+-tion (many false alarms)

Longtin et al ette in French gaufrette ‘little waffle’ - GAUFRE ‘waffle’ baguette ‘ bread’-BAGUE ‘ring’ abricot ‘ apricot’-ABRI ‘ shelter’ Different types of morphological relations between the target and the prime Experiment 1: masked visual-visual priming Experiment 2: Cross-modal priming task + Lexical decision to the target

Longtin et al 2003 – sensitive to morphological & semantic (but not pseudo-morphological or orthographic) overlap between the prime and the target Experiment 2 – cross-modal priming – sensitive to morphological & semantic (but not pseudo-morphological or orthographic) overlap between the prime and the target facilitation

Longtin et al 2003 Experiment 1 – masked priming #### - 46 ms prime – target – decision There is no time to access anything but the form of the prime (i.e. the semantics of the prime is not accessed) facilitation inhibition

 Taft and Forster (1975) –Prelexical Affix Stripping Hypothesis: Words are decomposed into their morphological constituents even in the absence of semantic transparency

Swinney (1979)  “Lexical Access during Sentence Comprehension: (Re)Consideration of Context Effects”  How are homonym words activated/accessed from the mental lexicon?

Homonyms  Homonyms - words that have the same pronunciation & spelling but differ in meaning  RING RING 1 : (noun) a typically circular band of metal […] for wearing on the finger as an ornament RING 2 : (verb) to give forth a clear resonant sound, as a bell when struck

Homonyms [  ] Conceptual Level Lemma Level Phonological Level [  ] N,…V,…

Homonyms Conceptual Level Lemma Level Phonological Level [  ] N,…V,…

Experiment 1: Stimuli  Swinney (1979)

Experiment 1: Results  Swinney (1979) 0

Experiment 2: Replication of Exp.1  Swinney (1979) 0

Interpretation of the results, Exp 1.  “The results of Experiment 1 provide fairly strong support for a model of sentential processing in which lexical access is an autonomous process; because semantic facilitation was observed for lexical decisions to words related to both the contextually relevant and the contextually inappropriate meaning of the ambiguity, even in the presence of the very strong prior semantic contexts, it appears reasonable to conclude that semantic context does not direct lexical access. Rather, immediately following occurrence of an ambiguous word all meanings for that word seem to be momentarily accessed during sentence comprehension.”

 What happens after one of the meanings of an ambiguous word is selected?

Experiment 2: a later position  A single change from Experiment 1: the visual (lexical decision) materials appeared three syllables following the ambiguous (or control) word during the course of the sentence.