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Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 12:2 (2017) ► pp.159–180

Revisiting form typicality of nouns and verbs

A usage-based approach

| New York University, New York | New York University, Abu Dhabi | Tufts University
| New York University, New York | New York University, Abu Dhabi

Research has shown that, in English, the mapping between a word’s form and its syntactic category is not entirely arbitrary. Though formal differences between lexical categories are subtle, adults are sensitive to them and access this knowledge when retrieving or manipulating grammatical category information. Studies of form typicality have so far exclusively investigated unambiguous (or disambiguated) wordforms. We test the prediction that form typicality also affects visual processing of ambiguous wordforms, with formal features correlating, not with a form’s designation as a particular category, but with a form’s probability of being used as a particular category. Our results indicate that “form discrepancy”, a measure of how well a form’s category usage matches up with its form (i.e. typically nouny forms associated with high probability of usage as a noun), is a significant predictor of lexical decision response time. These data are in line with models in which category is not specified for roots in the lexicon but rather assigned within syntactic or semantic context, and show that distributional information about grammatical category usage is automatically accessed in visual word processing.

Keywords: form typicality, grammatical category, phonotactics, lexical access
Article outline
  • Contributors to form typicality of nouns and verbs
  • Measuring form typicality
  • A discrepancy model of form typicality
  • Methods
    • Materials
    • Predictor variables
    • Outcome and control variables
      • Noun-verb ratio (NV ratio)
      • Lexical decision latencies
      • Noun-verb entropy (NV entropy)
  • Results
    • Analysis of corpus data
    • Analysis of behavioral data
  • Discussion
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
Published online: 15 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.17004.sha
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