Processing
Units for Morphologically Complex Verbs in Japanese
T. Takahashi & P. J. Schwanenflugel |
To
investigate the processing of Japanese verb morphology, a new experimental
task, segment naming task, was developed. Thirty undergraduate and
graduate students participated in this study. The participants in
Experiment 1 were asked to read aloud underlined bigrams embedded
in five-letter Kana verb-phrases that consisted of two morphemes.
Some bigrams were comprised of letters embedded within a morpheme,
whereas others crossed the boundary of two morphemes. Naming latency
was longer when a target bigram crossed the morphemic boundary than
when the bigram letters came from within the morpheme. Experiment
2 showed that this boundary-crossing effect was related to familiarity.
When phrases were familiar to readers, no boundary-crossing effect
was observed, which suggests that such phrases were processed as
one unit. When phrases were less familiar, a clear boundary-crossing
effect was observed, suggesting that such phrases were processed
as two units. A model of the processing Japanese verb morphology
is proposed. Key words: morphology (linguistics), Japanese, naming task, processing unit, mental lexicon |