Complexity in Derivational Morphology: Theory and Experimental Evidence

这项拟议的研究是一项理论和实验相结合的努力，旨在阐明派生形态学中的复杂性问题，以及复杂性如何反映在大脑签名证据的字处理中。派生的实验方法经常受到关于构词结构域(或者更准确地说，词位形成，与词形形成不同，就像屈折词法)的过于简单化的假设的阻碍。关于词(词位)在心理词典中是否被分解一直是争论的中心，词形关联性是如何建立在形式重叠和/或语义合成性之上的，以及出现频率在处理派生词过程中所起的作用仍然有些不清楚。这项计划中的研究对英语和德语进行了比较，这两种语言具有相似但不相同的语言结构。例如，后缀和前缀在两种语言中普遍存在，并允许形态和音素的变化。然而，存在系统的语音差异(例如，英语中的重音变化，德语中的元音变化)，派生所涉及的形态类别也不相同(例如，性别只与德语有关)。我们自己实验室的行为和脑成像数据都表明，形态派生的深度确实会影响加工，但到目前为止，我们还没有研究这种影响的时间进程，也没有系统地操纵派生过程中的语音变化。这将在德语和英语的一系列电生理学研究中进行研究。我们将能够比较不同类型的形态复杂性，在有和没有音素变化的情况下，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做出跨语言的概括，这在实验形态学中仍然是规则。

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.