Publication:
Morphological decomposition and the reverse base frequence effect

dc.contributor.author Taft, Marcus en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2021-11-25T13:39:47Z
dc.date.available 2021-11-25T13:39:47Z
dc.date.issued 2004 en_US
dc.description.abstract If recognition of a polymorphemic word always takes place via its decomposition into stem and affix, then the higher the frequency of its stem (i.e., base frequency) the easier the lexical decision response should be when frequency of the word itself (i.e., surface frequency) is controlled. Past experiments have demonstrated such a base frequency effect, but not under all circumstances. Thus, a dual pathway notion has become dominant as an account of morphological processing whereby both decomposition and whole-word access is possible. Two experiments are reported here that demonstrate how an obligatory decomposition account can handle the absence of base frequency effects. In particular, it is shown that the later stage of recombining the stem and affix is harder for high base frequency words than for lower base frequency words when matched on surface frequency, and that this can counterbalance the advantage of easier access to the higher frequency stem. When the combination stage is crucial for discriminating the word items from the nonword items, a reverse base frequency effect emerges, revealing the disadvantage at this stage for high base frequency words. Such an effect is hard for the dual-pathway account to explain, but follows naturally from the idea of obligatory decomposition. en_US
dc.identifier.issn 0272-4987 en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/40231
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.source Legacy MARC en_US
dc.title Morphological decomposition and the reverse base frequence effect en_US
dc.type Journal Article en
dcterms.accessRights metadata only access
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_14cb
unsw.identifier.doiPublisher http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02724980343000477 en_US
unsw.relation.faculty Science
unsw.relation.ispartofissue 4 en_US
unsw.relation.ispartofjournal Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology en_US
unsw.relation.ispartofpagefrompageto 745-765 en_US
unsw.relation.ispartofvolume 57A en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Taft, Marcus, Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.school School of Psychology *
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