Processing trade-offs in the reading of Dutch derived words

• Published in: Journal of memory and language Vol. 62; no. 2; pp. 83 - 97
• Main Authors: Kuperman, Victor, Bertram, Raymond, Baayen, R. Harald
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01.02.2010; Elsevier; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Biological and medical sciences; Derived words; Entropy; Eye Movements; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Indo European Languages; Information theory; Language; Language Processing; Lexical processing; Morphology; Morphology (Languages); Production and perception of written language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading; Scientific Concepts; Suffixes; Visual Stimuli; Visual task performance; Word Frequency; Word Recognition; Netherlands; Lexical processing; Eye movements; Morphology; Derived words; Information theory; Human; Word; Lexicon; Cognition; Experimental study; Eye movement; Reading; Language; Information processing; Dutch
• ISSN: 0749-596X; 1096-0821
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2009.10.001

This eye-tracking study explores visual recognition of Dutch suffixed words (e.g., plaats+ing “placing”) embedded in sentential contexts, and provides new evidence on the interplay between storage and computation in morphological processing. We show that suffix length crucially moderates the use of morphological properties. In words with shorter suffixes, we observe a stronger effect of full-forms (derived word frequency) on reading times than in words with longer suffixes. Also, processing times increase if the base word ( plaats) and the suffix ( -ing) differ in the amount of information carried by their morphological families (sets of words that share the base or the suffix). We model this imbalance of informativeness in the morphological families with the information-theoretical measure of relative entropy and demonstrate its predictivity for the processing times. The observed processing trade-offs are discussed in the context of current models of morphological processing.