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Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 18:2 (2023) ► pp.218–264

The distributional properties of prefixes influence lexical decision latencies

Evidence from Malay

| University of Western Ontario
| University of Western Ontario

Morphological processing has been extensively studied in English and European languages, but there is a growing interest in extending the research to other languages. Here we examined Malay, an Austronesian language that is morphologically rich. We investigated the effects of morphological constituents on lexical decisions for prefixed words. Specifically, we explored whether readers are sensitive to any distributional properties of the prefix and root morphemes. Variables investigated included length and family size for both prefixes and roots, as well as number of allomorphs, consistency, and productivity for prefixes. Decision latencies were collected for 1,280 Malay words of various morphological structures. Data from the 640 prefixed words were analyzed in a series of GAMM models. We observed a facilitative effect of root family size and an effect of several distributional properties of prefixes on decision latencies after accounting for word frequency and length. Furthermore, a larger interaction between frequency and several distributional properties of prefixes was found for words with three-letter prefixes than for those with two-letter prefixes. These findings provide insight into the types of distributional properties to which Malay readers are sensitive in multimorphemic words.

Keywords: word recognition, morphology, Malay, prefixes, lexical decision, morphological family size, prefix consistency, distributional properties
Article outline
  • The Malay language (Bahasa Melayu)
  • Theories of morphological processing
  • Effects of morphological variables
  • Effects of morphological variables in Malay
  • The present study
  • Method
    • Distributional properties of root and prefixes
      • Family size
      • Family frequency
      • Percentage of more frequent words (PFMF)
      • Morphemic length
      • Number of allomorphs
      • Prefix productivity
      • Prefix consistency
    • Participants
    • Stimuli
    • Procedure
  • Results
    • Overview of analyses
    • Regularized regression
    • Generalized additive mixed models (GAMM)
      • Root family size
      • Distributional properties of prefixes
      • Interactions with frequency and prefix length
      • Other prefix variables of interest
  • Discussion
    • Theoretical implications
    • Future directions
    • Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00023.maz
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