Complexity in Derivational Morphology: Theory and Experimental Evidence

拟议中的研究构成了一个理论和实验相结合的努力，阐明在派生形态学的复杂性的问题，以及复杂性是如何反映在文字处理的大脑签名的证据。推导的实验方法经常受到过于简单化的假设的阻碍，这些假设是关于构词的结构域（或者更准确地说，词位的形成，与词形的形成不同，就像在屈折形态学中一样）。核心的争论一直是关于词（词素）是否在心理词典中被分解，它仍然有些不清楚形态相关性是如何建立在形式重叠和/或语义组合，以及出现频率在处理派生词中的作用。计划中的研究比较了英语和德语，这两种语言具有可比但不相同的语言结构。例如，后缀和前缀占主导地位，并允许两种语言中的形态-语音变化。然而，有系统的语音差异（例如，英语中的重音交替，德语中的元音变音交替），并且派生中涉及的形态类别也不相同（例如，性别仅在德语中相关）。我们实验室的行为和脑成像数据都表明，形态推导的深度确实会影响加工，但我们还没有研究这种影响的时间过程，也没有系统地操纵推导中的语音变化。这将在德语和英语的一系列电生理学研究中进行调查。我们将能够比较不同类型的形态复杂性，有和没有语音的变化，我们的结果也将使我们能够以一种在检查单一语言时不可能的方式进行跨语言概括，这仍然是实验形态学的规则。

The proposed research constitutes a combined theoretical and experimental endeavour to shed light on the question of complexity in derivational morphology and on how complexity is reflected in word processing on the evidence of brain signatures. Experimental approaches to derivation have often been hampered by overly simplistic assumptions about the structural domain of word formation (or more precisely lexeme formation, as distinct from wordform formation as in inflectional morphology). The central debate has been about whether words (lexemes) are or are not decomposed in the mental lexicon, and it has remained somewhat unclear how morphological relatedness is founded on form overlap and/or semantic compositionality, and what the role of frequencies of occurrence is in processing derived words. The planned research compares English and German, which are related languages with comparable but not identical linguistic structures. For example, suffixation and prefixation prevail and allow morpho-phonological alternations in both languages. Nevertheless, there are systematic phonological differences (e.g., stress alternations in English, umlaut alternations in German), and the morphological categories involved in derivation are not identical, either (e.g., gender is only relevant in German). There has been both behavioural as well as brain-imaging data from our own labs that suggests that the depth of morphological derivation does affect processing, but as yet we have not investigated the time-course of this effect, nor have we systematically manipulated phonological alternations in derivation. This will be investigated in a series of electrophysiological studies in German and English. We will be able to compare different types of morphological complexities, with and without phonological alternations, and our results will also allow us to make cross-linguistic generalisations in a way which is not possible when examining a single language, as is still the rule in experimental morphology.