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.
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Petrovic, Andrija
2023. A formal account of morphological epenthesis in Serbo-Croatian. Morphology 33:3 ► pp. 335 ff.
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