The cognitive reality of morphomes: evidence from Italian

This study reports and discusses the results of a pilot psycholinguistic investigation into the morphome a term created (Aronoff 1994) to indicate systematic relations between form and meaning in morphology which lack synchronic semantic, functional, or phonological determinants and are thereby pure...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Cappellaro, Chiara, Dumrukcic, Nina, Fritz, Isabella, Franzon, Francesca, Maiden, Martin
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repositorio:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:recercat____::adff87e839b7b2f28f4e3c5ccda60f91
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10230/73457
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11525-023-09419-2
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Morphome
L-/U-pattern
Lexeme
Inflexional paradigm
Root allomorphy
Suppletion
Psychological reality
Eye tracking
Descripción
Sumario:This study reports and discusses the results of a pilot psycholinguistic investigation into the morphome a term created (Aronoff 1994) to indicate systematic relations between form and meaning in morphology which lack synchronic semantic, functional, or phonological determinants and are thereby purely morphological. Despite a general consensus (cf. Bermúdez-Otero and Luís 2016) on the need to approach the question of the existence and nature of morphomic structures experimentally and interdisciplinarily, there has been no study beyond Nevins, Rodrigues, and Tang (2015), which focused on the morphomic structure in Romance verb morphology identified by Maiden (1992) and labelled (arbitrarily) the `L-pattern and concluded that in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese this structure is no longer part of native speakers grammar. The present study has replicated, for Italian, the basic experimental design of Nevins et al. It has obtained behavioural measurements (from two experiments) including eyetracking measures (from one experiment). All these measurements converge in showing (i) a statistically significant preference for target items that are consistent with the L-/U-pattern distribution and (ii) a faster decision-making process when the L-item was chosen. We conclude that (pace Nevins et al.) this morphomic structure is part of the internalized grammar of Italian adult speakers.