Skip to content
Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton December 23, 2016

Contributions of linguistic typology to psycholinguistics

  • Harald Clahsen EMAIL logo
From the journal Linguistic Typology

Abstract

This article first outlines different ways of how psycholinguists have dealt with linguistic diversity and illustrates these approaches with three familiar cases from research on language processing, language acquisition, and language disorders. The second part focuses on the role of morphology and morphological variability across languages for psycholinguistic research. The specific phenomena to be examined are to do with stem-formation morphology and inflectional classes; they illustrate how experimental research that is informed by linguistic typology can lead to new insights.

Acknowledgements

Supported by an Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship. I wish to thank the members of the Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism (PRIM), particularly João Veríssimo, Yael Farhy, and Claudia Felser for helpful comments on the present article.

Abbreviations

1/3

1st/3rd person

inf

infinitive

m

masculine

pst

past

ptcp

participle

sg

singular

References

Albright, Adam. 2002. Islands of reliability for regular morphology: Evidence from Italian. Language 78. 684–709.10.1353/lan.2003.0002Search in Google Scholar

Albright, Adam & Bruce Hayes. 2003. Rules vs. analogy in English past tenses: A computational/experimental study. Cognition 90. 119–161.10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00146-XSearch in Google Scholar

Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511586262Search in Google Scholar

Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Berent, Iris, Vered Vaknin & Gary F. Marcus. 2007. Roots, stems, and the universality of lexical representations: Evidence from Hebrew. Cognition 104. 254–286.10.1016/j.cognition.2006.06.002Search in Google Scholar

Berman, Ruth A. 2014. Cross-linguistic comparisons in child language research. Journal of Child Language 41(S1). 26–37.10.1017/S0305000914000208Search in Google Scholar

Bick, Atira S., Gadi Goelman & Ram Frost. 2011. Hebrew brain vs. English brain: Language modulates the way it is processed. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23. 2280–2290.10.1162/jocn.2010.21583Search in Google Scholar

Boudelaa, Sami & William D. Marslen-Wilson. 2015. Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: Evidence from Arabic. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30. 955–992.10.1080/23273798.2015.1048258Search in Google Scholar

Bybee, Joan L. & Carol Lynn Moder. 1983. Morphological classes as natural categories. Language 59. 251–270.10.2307/413574Search in Google Scholar

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Clahsen, Harald. 1986. Verb inflections in German child language: Acquisition of agreement markings and the functions they encode. Linguistics 24. 79–122.10.1515/ling.1986.24.1.79Search in Google Scholar

Clahsen, Harald, Fraibet Aveledo & Iggy Roca. 2002. The development of regular and irregular verb inflection in Spanish child language. Journal of Child Language 29. 591–622.10.1017/S0305000902005172Search in Google Scholar

Clahsen, Harald & Martina Penke. 1992. The acquisition of agreement morphology and its syntactic consequences: New evidence on German child language from the Simone-Corpus. In Jürgen M. Meisel (ed.), The acquisition of verb placement: Functional categories and V2 phenomena in language acquisition, 181–223. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-011-2803-2_7Search in Google Scholar

De Diego Balaguer, Ruth, Nuria Sebastián-Gallés, Begoña Díaz & Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells. 2005. Morphological processing in early bilinguals: An ERP study of regular and irregular verb processing. Cognitive Brain Research 25. 312–327.10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2005.06.003Search in Google Scholar

Farhy, Yael, João Veríssimo & Harald Clahsen. 2016. Universal and particular in morphological processing: Evidence from Hebrew. Unpublished manuscript, Universität Potsdam.Search in Google Scholar

Field, John. 2004. Psycholinguistics: The key concepts. Abingdon: Routledge.10.4324/9780203506929Search in Google Scholar

Frost, Ram, Avital Deutsch, Orna Gilboa, Michal Tannenbaum & William D. Marslen-Wilson. 2000. Morphological priming: Dissociation of phonological, semantic, and morphological factors. Memory & Cognition 28. 1277–1288.10.3758/BF03211828Search in Google Scholar

Gor, Kira & Svetlana Cook. 2010. Nonnative processing of verbal morphology: In search of regularity. Language Learning 60. 88–126.10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00552.xSearch in Google Scholar

Grodzinsky, Yosef. 1990. Theoretical perspectives on language deficits. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/6742.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Joanisse, Marc F. & Mark S. Seidenberg. 1999. Impairments in verb morphology after brain injury: A connectionist model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96. 7592–7597.10.1073/pnas.96.13.7592Search in Google Scholar

Marcus, Gary F., Ursula Brinkmann, Harald Clahsen, Richard Wiese & Steven Pinker. 1995. German inflection: The exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology 29. 189–256.10.1006/cogp.1995.1015Search in Google Scholar

Marcus, Gary F., Steven Pinker, Michael Ullman, Michelle Hollander, T. John Rosen, Fei Xu & Harald Clahsen. 1992. Overregularization in language acquisition (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 228). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.10.2307/1166115Search in Google Scholar

Marslen-Wilson, William D., Lorraine K. Tyler, Rachelle Waksler & Lianne Older. 1994. Morphology and meaning in the English mental lexicon. Psychological Review 101. 3–33.10.1037/0033-295X.101.1.3Search in Google Scholar

McClelland, James L. & Karalyn Patterson. 2002. Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6. 465–472.10.1016/S1364-6613(02)01993-9Search in Google Scholar

Nichols, Johanna. 2016. Morphology in linguistic typology. In Andrew Hippisley & Gregory Stump (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781139814720.025Search in Google Scholar

Orsolini, Margherira, Rachele Fanari & Hugo Bowles. 1998. Acquiring regular and irregular inflection in a language with verb classes. Language and Cognitive Processes 13. 425–464.10.1080/016909698386456Search in Google Scholar

Pinker, Steven. 1999. Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York, NY: Basic Books.Search in Google Scholar

Pinker, Steven & Michael T. Ullman. 2002. The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6. 456–463.10.1016/S1364-6613(02)01990-3Search in Google Scholar

Prasada, Sandeep & Steven Pinker. 1993. Generalization of regular and irregular morphological patterns. Language and Cognitive Processes 8. 1–56.10.1080/01690969308406948Search in Google Scholar

Rumelhart, David E. & James L. McClelland. 1986. On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClelland & The PDP Research Group (eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition, Vol. 2, 216–271. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Say, Tessa & Harald Clahsen. 2002. Words, rules and stems in the Italian mental lexicon. In Sieb Nooteboom, Fred Weerman & Frank Wijnen (eds.), Storage and computation in the language faculty, 93–129. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-010-0355-1_4Search in Google Scholar

Slobin, Dan I. & Thomas G. Bever. 1982. Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12. 229–265.10.1016/0010-0277(82)90033-6Search in Google Scholar

Stanners, Robert F., James J. Neiser, William P. Hernon & Roger Hall. 1979. Memory representation for morphologically related words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18. 399–412.10.1016/S0022-5371(79)90219-6Search in Google Scholar

Stavrakaki, Stavroula & Harald Clahsen. 2009. The perfective past tense in Greek child language. Journal of Child Language 36. 113–142.10.1017/S0305000908008866Search in Google Scholar

Stump, Gregory T. 2001. Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486333Search in Google Scholar

Townsend, David J. & Thomas G. Bever. 2001. Sentence comprehension: The integration of habits and rules. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/6184.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Ullman, Michael T., Roumyana Pancheva, Tracy Love, Eiling Yee, David Swinney & Gregory Hickok. 2005. Neural correlates of lexicon and grammar: Evidence from the production, reading, and judgment of inflection in aphasia. Brain and Language 93. 185–238.10.1016/j.bandl.2004.10.001Search in Google Scholar

Veríssimo, João & Harald Clahsen. 2009. Morphological priming by itself: A study of Portuguese conjugations. Cognition 112. 187–194.10.1016/j.cognition.2009.04.003Search in Google Scholar

Veríssimo, João & Harald Clahsen. 2014. Variables and similarity in linguistic generalization: Evidence from inflectional classes in Portuguese. Journal of Memory and Language 76. 61–79.10.1016/j.jml.2014.06.001Search in Google Scholar

Villalva, Alina. 2000. Estruturas morfológicas: Unidades e hierarquias nas palavras do português. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian & Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.Search in Google Scholar

Received: 2016-8-30
Revised: 2016-9-25
Published Online: 2016-12-23
Published in Print: 2016-12-1

©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton

Downloaded on 5.12.2023 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2016-0031/html
Scroll to top button