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Functionalist and Usage-based Approaches to the Study of Language: In honor of Joan L. Bybee
Edited by K. Aaron Smith and Dawn Nordquist
[Studies in Language Companion Series 192] 2018
► pp. 199–224

The evidence add ups

An affix shift study of prefabs

| University of Canterbury

In a usage-based model of the lexicon, linguistic elements that repeatedly co-occur in sequence come to form a processing unit (Bybee 2002b). The present study supplements previous psycholinguistic research finding that multiword sequences may form a ‘prefabricated’ sequence. I describe a new experiment designed to elicit ‘affix shift’ speech errors (e.g., adds up → add ups), which give evidence of holistic processing of a multiword sequence. Analysis of the data indicates that affix positioning errors are predicted by a confluence of factors – a high-frequency stimulus sequence (settle down) in tandem with low-frequency component words (settle, down). These findings provide support for a usage-based account, in which linguistic units are not fixed, but gradient and changeable with experience.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Errors of interest, and theoretical background
      • 1.1.1Full affix shifts
      • 1.1.2Double-marked affixes
      • 1.1.3No-marking errors
    • 1.2Predictions, and quantitative corpus metrics
  • 2.Task design
    • 2.1Materials and stimulus design
      • 2.1.1Frequency x Mutual Dependency bins
      • 2.1.2Bigram features matched across bins
      • 2.1.3Bigram stimuli and distractors
    • 2.2Participants and experiment setup
    • 2.3Results and discussion: Affix shifts and other affixation errors on bigram stimuli
      • 2.3.1Participant accuracy
      • 2.3.2Overview of errors: Affix shifts, double-marking errors, no-marking errors
  • 3.Data and analysis
    • 3.1Post hoc analysis: Examining components of the MD metric
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.192.09bec
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