Decomposability and mental representation of French verbs
In French, regardless of stem regularity, inflectional verbal suffixes are extremely regular and paradigmatic. Considering the complexity of the French verbal system, we argue that all French verbs are polymorphemic forms that are decomposed during visual recognition independently of their stem regu...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2015-01-01
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| Series: | Frontiers in Human Neuroscience |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00004/full |
| _version_ | 1818097318362087424 |
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| author | Gustavo Lopez Estivalet Gustavo Lopez Estivalet Fanny Elise Meunier Fanny Elise Meunier |
| author_facet | Gustavo Lopez Estivalet Gustavo Lopez Estivalet Fanny Elise Meunier Fanny Elise Meunier |
| author_sort | Gustavo Lopez Estivalet |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | In French, regardless of stem regularity, inflectional verbal suffixes are extremely regular and paradigmatic. Considering the complexity of the French verbal system, we argue that all French verbs are polymorphemic forms that are decomposed during visual recognition independently of their stem regularity. We conducted a behavioural experiment in which we manipulated the surface and cumulative frequencies of verbal inflected forms and asked participants to perform a visual lexical decision task. We tested four types of verbs with respect to their stem variants: a. fully regular (parler ‘to speak’, [parl-]); b. phonological change e/E verbs with orthographic markers (répéter ‘to repeat’, [répét-] and [répèt-]); c. phonological change o/O verbs without orthographic markers (adorer ‘to adore’, [ador-] and [adOr-]); and d. idiosyncratic (boire ‘to drink’, [boi-] and [buv-]). For each type of verb, we contrasted four conditions, forms with high and low surface frequencies and forms with high and low cumulative frequencies. Our results showed a significant cumulative frequency effect for the fully regular and idiosyncratic verbs, indicating that different stems within idiosyncratic verbs (such as [boi-] and [buv-]) have distinct representations in the mental lexicon as different fully regular verbs. For the phonological change verbs, we found a significant cumulative frequency effect only when considering the two forms of the stem together ([répét-] and [répèt-]), suggesting that they share a single abstract and underspecified phonological representation. Our results also revealed a significant surface frequency effect for all types of verbs, which may reflect the recombination of the stem lexical representation with the functional information of the suffixes. Overall, these results indicate that all inflected verbal forms in French are decomposed during visual recognition and that this process could be due to the regularities of the French inflectional verbal suffixes. |
| first_indexed | 2024-12-10T23:18:37Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-26a666ebf4f04cb8bc113a8801e4380d |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 1662-5161 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-12-10T23:18:37Z |
| publishDate | 2015-01-01 |
| publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Frontiers in Human Neuroscience |
| spelling | doaj.art-26a666ebf4f04cb8bc113a8801e4380d2022-12-22T01:29:46ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Human Neuroscience1662-51612015-01-01910.3389/fnhum.2015.00004119487Decomposability and mental representation of French verbsGustavo Lopez Estivalet0Gustavo Lopez Estivalet1Fanny Elise Meunier2Fanny Elise Meunier3CNRS UMR5304 Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la CognitionUniversité de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1CNRS UMR5304 Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la CognitionUniversité de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1In French, regardless of stem regularity, inflectional verbal suffixes are extremely regular and paradigmatic. Considering the complexity of the French verbal system, we argue that all French verbs are polymorphemic forms that are decomposed during visual recognition independently of their stem regularity. We conducted a behavioural experiment in which we manipulated the surface and cumulative frequencies of verbal inflected forms and asked participants to perform a visual lexical decision task. We tested four types of verbs with respect to their stem variants: a. fully regular (parler ‘to speak’, [parl-]); b. phonological change e/E verbs with orthographic markers (répéter ‘to repeat’, [répét-] and [répèt-]); c. phonological change o/O verbs without orthographic markers (adorer ‘to adore’, [ador-] and [adOr-]); and d. idiosyncratic (boire ‘to drink’, [boi-] and [buv-]). For each type of verb, we contrasted four conditions, forms with high and low surface frequencies and forms with high and low cumulative frequencies. Our results showed a significant cumulative frequency effect for the fully regular and idiosyncratic verbs, indicating that different stems within idiosyncratic verbs (such as [boi-] and [buv-]) have distinct representations in the mental lexicon as different fully regular verbs. For the phonological change verbs, we found a significant cumulative frequency effect only when considering the two forms of the stem together ([répét-] and [répèt-]), suggesting that they share a single abstract and underspecified phonological representation. Our results also revealed a significant surface frequency effect for all types of verbs, which may reflect the recombination of the stem lexical representation with the functional information of the suffixes. Overall, these results indicate that all inflected verbal forms in French are decomposed during visual recognition and that this process could be due to the regularities of the French inflectional verbal suffixes.http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00004/fullmorphologyregularitylexical accessdecompositionfrequency effectsverb inflection |
| spellingShingle | Gustavo Lopez Estivalet Gustavo Lopez Estivalet Fanny Elise Meunier Fanny Elise Meunier Decomposability and mental representation of French verbs Frontiers in Human Neuroscience morphology regularity lexical access decomposition frequency effects verb inflection |
| title | Decomposability and mental representation of French verbs |
| title_full | Decomposability and mental representation of French verbs |
| title_fullStr | Decomposability and mental representation of French verbs |
| title_full_unstemmed | Decomposability and mental representation of French verbs |
| title_short | Decomposability and mental representation of French verbs |
| title_sort | decomposability and mental representation of french verbs |
| topic | morphology regularity lexical access decomposition frequency effects verb inflection |
| url | http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00004/full |
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