The effects of frequency and neighbourhood density on adult speakers' productivity with Polish case inflections: An empirical test of usage-based approaches to morphology
The effects of frequency and neighbourhood density on adult speakers' productivity with Polish case inflections: An empirical test of usage-based approaches to morphology
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DOI：
10.1016/j.jml.2007.11.005
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发表时间：
2008-05-01
影响因子：
4.3
通讯作者：
Dabrowska, Ewa
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Dabrowska, Ewa
一项测试成年波兰人提供不熟悉名词与格形式的能力的实验显示了类型频率（适用于大类的屈折变化表现更好）和社区密度（参与者更有可能提供属于人口密集社区的临时名词的目标屈折变化，即，那些与许多现有名词相似的名词，而不是与语言中少数单词相似的名词）。这些发现证实了基于使用的理论的两个核心主张：更频繁的模式更有可能被有效地使用;说话者更喜欢低层次的概括，而不是语音相似形式的集群，或者共享相同派生词缀的单词集群，而不是更全面的概括。实验还显示，个体说话者对临时词的屈折变化能力存在相当大的差异，类似于词汇量的差异。临时词变形任务的表现与词汇量和教育程度显着相关。两个进一步的实验表明，受教育程度较低的参与者能够提供适当的与格形式的真实的名词在相同的语法背景下，和他们的困难与nonce词的变形任务是不能推断的nonce词的性别。(C)2007年爱思唯尔公司All rights reserved.
An experiment testing adult Polish speakers' ability to supply dative forms of unfamiliar nouns revealed strong effects of type frequency (performance was better on inflections that apply to large classes) and neighbourhood density (participants were more likely to supply the target inflection with nonce nouns belonging to densely populated neighbourhoods, i.e., those which are similar to many existing nouns, than with nouns that resemble few words in the language). These findings corroborate two central claims of usage-based theories: that more frequent patterns are more likely to be used productively; and that speakers prefer low-level generalizations over clusters of phonologically similar forms, or clusters of words sharing the same derivational affix, over more global generalizations.The experiment also revealed considerable differences in individual speakers' ability to inflect nonce words, similar in magnitude to differences in vocabulary size. Performance on the nonce word inflection task was significantly correlated with vocabulary and education. Two further experiments show that the less educated participants were able to supply the appropriate dative forms of real nouns in the same grammatical contexts, and that their difficulties with the nonce word inflection task are not attributable to inability to infer the gender of the nonce word. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.