Chapter published in:
All Things Morphology: Its independence and its interfacesEdited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 147–168
Chapter 9The suffixing preference
A preliminary report on processing affixes in Georgian
Alice C. Harris | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Arthur G. Samuel | Stony Brook University | Ikerbasque, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and
Language
The suffixing preference refers to the
observation that cross-linguistically suffixes are more abundant
than prefixes (Greenberg
1963). Hawkins &
Cutler (1988) explain this preference in part by noting
that spoken word recognition relies heavily on the beginnings of
words, making it advantageous to have no prefix. To test the
Hawkins-Cutler hypothesis in Georgian, we carried out lexical
decision experiments, a standard kind of experiment in which the
participant is presented with real words and nonce words and must
identify which is which. In general, responses to Georgian words
with prefixes were more accurate and/or faster than to comparable
words with suffixes. These results suggest that prefixes may be
easier to process than suffixes, contrary to the universalist claim
stated above.
Keywords: suffixing preference, word recognition, processing, lexical decision, Georgian
Article outline
- 1.The Hawkins-Cutler hypothesis and subsequent work
- 2.Overview of the morphology studied
- 3.Experiment 1
- 3.1Materials
- 3.2Subjects and methods
- 3.3Results and discussion
- 4.Experiment 2
- 4.1Materials
- Complex stems with v- or -s
- Derivational prefix i- or suffix -d
- 4.2Subjects and methods
- 4.3Results and discussion
- Complex stems with v- or -s
- Derivational prefix i- or suffix -d
- 4.1Materials
- 5.Concluding discussion
-
Notes -
References
Published online: 25 August 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.353.09har
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.353.09har
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