Morphological Knowledge

Morphological Knowledge is the knowledge of complex words and of morphological

rules and is represented in the human mind and how it is used in language processing

( Booij , 2005 , P. 231 ) . The paper searches for the above concept, mind and

morphology . This idea is very important because mental representation of

morphological knowledge is a fertile ground for many different theories about the

nature of linguistic rules. When someone wants to use the word books, he must do

this either by retrieving the plural form of the word book from his lexical memory or

creating a new word immediately by adding the plural suffix -s to the stem book ( Ib

Id ) . It is a cognitive process that demonstrates that morphology can be a window of

the human mind as a domain in psycholinguistics or what ( Crystal , 2008 , P. 396 )

expresses about as department of linguistics which research the correlate between

linguistic behavior and the psychological tactics thought to underlie that behavior.

There are two viable directions of study. One may additionally use language as a

capability of elucidating psychological theories and processes (e.g. the function of

language as it impacts memory, perception, attention, learning, etc.), and for this the

time period psychological linguistics is now and again used. Alternatively, one may

additionally look into the consequences of psychological constraints on the use of

language (e.g. how reminiscence barriers have an effect on speech production and

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comprehension). It is the latter which has provided the main center of attention of

interest in linguistics, where the difficulty is essentially considered as the learn about

of the intellectual strategies underlying the planning, production, perception and

comprehension of speech, and investigations usually proceed by means of inspecting

linguistic performance through small-scale experimental tasks. A theory-driven

strategy is additionally encountered, in which evidence to support a factor of

linguistic concept (often in relation to generative grammar) accumulates using such

techniques as person grammaticality judgments. The concern now consists of a

massive quantity of research domains, fairly infant language acquisition, 2nd

language acquisition, language processing, linguistic complexity, the relationship

between linguistic and cognitive universals, the learn about of reading, language

pathology, and species specificity.

Mental knowledge of words is crystallized by the idea that lexical knowledge in the

native speaker is quite different from the form in the dictionary. This concept can be

easily identified by the entries of a good dictionary, as it is enormously larger than

those found in words in the mind. There are many words that many people do not

know. The native adult speakers of English , who got a higher education may know a

little more than 50,000 word types and certainly, words that one understands without

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being spoken are more than words that are actually used in language ( Booij , 2005 ,

P . 232 ) .

Speakers of each language, then, draw on a common set of forms with agreed-on

meanings when they talk. In general, words provide the building blocks for larger

units. They may be combined as idioms, where the meanings of the parts do not add

up to the meaning of the whole, as in to belt up, to be in a flap, to hit the sack, to keep

tabs on, or to blow one's own trumpet. Idioms like these are typically restricted in

syntax, so some, for instance, may not appear in the passive (compare He blew his

own trumpet vs. * His own trumpet was blown by himself). Words may be combined

in short phrases that act as if they were single words, as in by and large, in short,

happy go lucky, or once upon a time (Clark ,1993 ,P. 303). .

So the cognitive linguistic construction are quite clear that it is radically different

from that found in the dictionaries as a mental chain as Clark explained above. A

dictionary is inherently conservative, containing words no longer used. Dictionaries

that are printed at another time contain new words and delete other words. The mental

process is quite different, man always has the ability to use words not yet placed in a

dictionary ( Booij , 2005 , P.232 ) , or as ( Yule , 2006 , P.291 ) states as neologisms

(a new word ) . Certainly there are differences between the dictionary and the mental

lexicon . A mental lexicon is the sum of everything an individual speaker knows

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about the words of his language. It contains information about pronunciation,

category (part of speech) and meaning. It also includes information about grammatical

properties, for example, whether a verb is transitive or intransitive , level of formality

or what lexicographers call (range of application) , any specific terms in which the

word is used, if it is used as a noun or as a verb or used in standard and colloquial

(Lieber , 2009 , P.15 ) .

Words in the mental lexicon carry a number of relationships to each other. Words that

have similar meanings or similar phonological forms appear to be related in the

mental lexicon, this is inferred from speech errors ( Booij , 2005 , P. 233 ) . The

mental lexicon as a multidimensional web of words, with all kinds of connections

between those words: semantic similarities, phonological similarities, and

morphological relationships. In a dictionary, on the other hand, words have one type

of relationship only, that of alphabetical ordering. This ordering is based on the

degree of orthographical similarity between words. Another difference between

dictionary and a mental lexicon is that the letter also stores information about the

frequency with which you come across a word , for instance the word nice is used far

more frequently than the word opaque . .

It is quite likely that in our mental lexicons we have entries that are occurred only

partial. One may know the pronunciation of a word, but not its meaning (e.g., One

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knows how to pronounce amortize, but he is not sure what it means). Or the opposite:

for example, he knows what the word hegemony means, but he does not know if it’s

pronounced with the stress on the first or second syllable. One may also have only

partial knowledge of the meaning of a word. He knows , for example, that a

distributor is part of a car and that if he has to replace it, it’s a relatively expensive

job, but he does not know what a distributor looks like or what it does Each person’s

mental lexicon is sure to contain things that are different from other people’s mental

lexicons. One person may know lots of words for types of birds or flowers, another

might know all the specialized vocabulary of sailing, and so on. Auto mechanics

surely know more details of the meaning of the word distributor than I do. But the

individual mental lexicons overlap enough that one can speak the same language

(Lieber , 2009 , P.16).

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Acquisition of Morphology

Morphological rules are discovered on the basis of words formed according to these

laws. Children in the first phase of acquisition acquire complex single words. The

children then learn how to add (s) of the plural to the individual nouns to make plural

nouns , and then make plural nouns that they have never heard of before (Booij , 2005

, P. 236 – 237 ) .

This stage is certainly not without overgeneralization . At the lexical level, children

over generalize words to referents for which they would not be appropriate for adults

at the morphological level, children over generalize derivational suffixes at the level

of verb argument structure (syntax), children over generalize verbs into syntactic

constructions with which they are incompatible ( Ambridge & et al , 2012 , P . 48 ) .

In childhood, children acquire higher frequency morphological forms (which are used

more than other forms ). Children have the ability to formulate new words at an early

age. They can also acquire the compound . Compounding is acquired relatively early

because it complies with two principles , those of transparency and simplicity . The

meaning of compounds can be related very easily to those of its constituent words and

hence their meaning is transparent . Morever the form of the constituent elements is

not really changed where they are part of compounds and thus conforms to the

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requirement of simplicity (Booij , 2005 , P . 238-239). Although simplicity concept in

linguistics may be confused , Bochner ( 1993 , P.1) states perhaps confusion about

this matter can be traced to the use of the term "Simplicity Measure" for particular

proposed evaluation measures, it being assumed that "simplicity" is a general notion

somehow understood in advance outside of linguistic theory. Children at an early age

can connect between the verb and the stem noun . They also use the noun as a verb or

to refer to the noun's activities. Children at an early age are able to compare and

analyze words, especially those with morphological structures(Ib Id ).

These words and their morphological forms are the main component of Syntax ,

Aitchison ( 1987 , P. 97 ) states that , gradually words are integrated into the network

and the links are built between co-ordinates , perhaps partly as a consequence of

acquiring syntax and partly to allow for fast word finding as the overall vocabulary

increases.

Psycholinguists have made experiments to try to learn how children and adults are

able to acquire words so easily. One might think that the learning of new words is a

simple matter of association: someone points at something and says “flurge” and you

learn that that something is called a flurge. This may be the way that we learn some

.words, but surely not the way we learn the majority of words in our mental lexicons

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For one thing, not everything for which we have a word can be pointed at

( Lieber , 2009 , P . 16 ) . Besides, we are rarely in a situation in which someone is

actively instructing us about the meanings of words; although parents may point to

things in a picture book and name them for a child, or school children may be asked to

memorize a list of vocabulary words, we learn most words without explicit instruction

and seemingly with very little exposure. Although we do not know nearly enough

about this subject, there are several things that we do know about how word learning

occurs ( Ib Id : P.17 ) . It is believed that both children and adults are able to do what

the psycholinguist Susan Carey has called fast mapping . Fast mapping is the ability

to pick up new words on the basis of a few random exposures to them. In one

experiment, Carey showed that children who were casually exposed to a new color

name chromium during an unrelated activity (following instructions to pick up trays

of various colors) were able to absorb the word and recall it even six weeks later.

Experiments have shown that adults exhibit this fast mapping ability as well; while

the ability to learn linguistic rules (say, of syntax or phonology) is thought to decline

after puberty, the ability to learn new words remains robust ( Ib Id ) .

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The Evidences on the Mental Source Side of Morphological

Information

How can one determine how morphological statistics is represented in the mind?

There are two important sources of evidence: experimental and naturalistic data.

Psychologists use experiments, and in the realm of morphology

lexical choice duties are the most extensively used way of probing into the

mental illustration of morphology Lexical decision tasks are often used in

combination with priming ( Booij , 2005 , P.240 ) .

priming experiments: two stimuli are presented to subjects and it is tested whether the

first stimulus (word) has influence on the recognition of the second .Priming is an

improvement in performance in a perceptual or cognitive task, relative to an

appropriate baseline, produced by context or prior experience. Semantic priming

refers to the improvement in speed or accuracy to respond to a stimulus, such as a

word or a picture, when it is preceded by a semantically related stimulus (e.g., cat-

dog) relative to when it is preceded by a semantically unrelated stimulus (e.g., table-

dog). The stimulus to which responses are made (e.g., dog) is the target and the

preceding stimulus (e.g., cat or table) is the prime. The classical task for investigating

semantic priming is the lexical decision task. The stimuli consist of correctly spelled

words and meaningless strings of letters called “non words” (e.g., blit). On each trial

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of the experiment, a prime and a target are displayed on a computer screen.

Participants are instructed to read the prime silently and then to decide whether the

target is a word or a non word. The standard finding is that lexical decision responses

are faster and more accurate when the target is semantically related to the prime (e.g.,

cat-dog) than when the target is semantically unrelated to the prime (e.g., table-dog).

Another commonly used task is naming or pronunciation. In this task, people are

asked to read the target word aloud as rapidly as possible (non words are typically not

presented). Again, the common finding is that people can name the target word faster

when it is primed by a semantically related word than when it is primed by a

semantically unrelated word ( Mcnamara , 2005 , P. 4) . Priming means that the prior

presentation of another word. This means that the subject who has to make a lexical

decision first receives some other information.

An example of priming is the following: if one has to decide if calculation is a word

of English, the response latency will be reduced if, before this task is performed, the

same word calculation is presented to the eye or the ear of the subject, a case of

identity priming. This effect suggests that the word calculation receives a higher level

of activation by previous access to the same word. Other ways of priming are

phonological priming (the prime word is phonologically similar to the target word),

and semantic priming (with a semantically similar word as the prime). In the case of

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the target word calculation, the words calcium and computation may function as

phonological and semantic primes. If these primes reduce response latencies for the

target word, one can conclude that words in the mental lexicon are connected to

words that are either phonologically or semantically similar. In morphological

priming, a word that is morphologically related to the target word is used as a prime.

For instance, calculate will function as a prime for calculation. As this example

shows, it may be that the latter kind of priming is in fact a combination of

phonological and semantic priming, and not an independent phenomenon.(Booij ,

2005 , P.241) . Naturalistic data are the 2nd source of proof for theories of

morphology in the mind. These are statistics regarding the true conduct of language

users. When we study that teenagers coin new words or word types that they have no

longer come throughout before, this varieties naturalistic information that might also

be interpreted as evidence for the children’s having obtained morphological rules. The

same applies to the language use of adults. We can conclude that a morphological

sample has the popularity of productive rule if new instantiations of that sample are

determined in the true language use of native speakers. Speech mistakes (which can

also be elicited in experiments) are any other occasion of naturalistic data ( Ib Id) .

A last source of naturalistic data to be mentioned here is that of language pathology.

The language behaviour of people with a language deficit, such as aphasia, may throw

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light on the mental representation of morphology. Aphasia is a language impairment

resulting from damage to the brain, in most cases due to a cardiovascular accident.

Aphasics that suffer from agrammatism (the inability to use rules), usually referred to

as Broca aphasics, may not be able to produce correct plural forms of nouns, except

for nouns with a high frequency plural form such as the word eyes(Ib Id ) . The

following example will illustrate this concept:

?IT’S SIX O’CLOCK. WON’T THAT BE TOO EARLY TO BUY BREAD

Mistakes like this occur repeatedly in the speech of some aphasics, and in its extreme

form the general condition is sometimes rather pompously labelled ‘conceptual

agrammatism’. Such patients confuse words like YESTERDAY, TODAY and

TOMORROW. They seem able to find names connected with the general area they

are talking about, but unable to pinpoint particular words within it, so that a ‘garden

roller’ could be called a LAWN MOWER, a ‘spade’ may be called a FORK, and a

‘rake’ may be called a HOE. A mistake like this occurred in one of the aphasic

passages quoted above, when the patient said DIVING instead of ‘swimming

( Aitchison , 2008 , P.242 ). This is evidence for the position that high-frequency

plural nouns are retrieved from lexical memory, whereas low-frequency plural forms

are computed on the spot, and may not be stored. In an investigation of three

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German aphasic patients with agrammatism it was found that their syntactic abilities

were severely impaired, whereas their ability to use inflectional morphology was still

intact . This fact can be interpreted as evidence for the position that syntactic rules

belong to a different module of the grammar than the rules of inflectional

morphology (Booij , 2005 ,P.242). The discovered capacity of native speakers to coin

new phrases or word varieties is the simple argument for assuming that morphological

knowledge encompasses greater than storage of the complicated words that language

users are exposed to. There ought to be mechanisms in the mind that allow us to

prolong the set of complex phrases in a language. For languages with a wealthy

machine of inflectional morphology such as Turkish, the place every phrase may have

lots or hundreds of forms, it would even be quite absurd to expect that all these

varieties are memorized as such. The reminiscence load for such languages can be

decreased drastically through making use of rules. A viable model is that language

customers acquire morphological guidelines by way of constructing abstract

regulations or templates on the foundation of their lexical knowledge ( Ib Id ) .

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The Scope of Morphological Knowledge in the Mind

the storage at the time of need. It is also a system that forms rules without the need to

recall storage. These facts have led a number of linguists to defend a dual system

model of morphological knowledge . The past tense and participial forms of regular

English verbs are not stored in lexical memory, but always created by rule. The

irregular forms, on the other hand, are stored in memory. These stored irregular forms

are linked to each other in an associative way, and thus the language user will be able

to discover similarity patterns such as -ing/k -ang/k -ung/k for the set of certain

verbs . This explains why the pattern may be extended incidentally to similar verbs

such as to bring .(Booij , 2005 , P.242) . The pioneer in the field of this research is

Clahsen where he reached the following results .By looking at the regular and

irregular inflection of the German past participle and the noun plural formation from

various perspectives Clahsen achieved his main goal namely to show that the

language faculty has a modular structure of two basic components: a lexicon of

structured entries and a computational system of combinatorial operations. Because

he argues for the strong position that only irregular inflected words are stored in the

lexicon, where as all regular inflected words are processed by rule some problems

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arise. His proposed model is not fine grained enough to capture for instance all the

nuances of regularities within the German plural inflection system and it can’t deal

with frequency effects for regular inflected words .

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Aitchison , J . ( 1987 ) . Words in the Mind . Washington D.C. :Library of Congress

Ambridge , B. Pine , J . Rowland , C & Chang , F . ( 2012 ) . The retreat from

Bochner , H . ( 1993 ) . Simplicity in Generative Morphology . Washington D.C. :

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Booij , G . ( 2005 ) . The Grammar of Words . Oxford :Oxford University Press

Clark , E . ( 1993 ) The Lexicon in Acquisition . Cambridge :Cambridge University

Press

Crystal , D . ( 2008 ) . A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics . New Jersey:

Blackwell Publishing

Lieber , R . ( 2009 ) . Introducing Morphology . Cambridge :Cambridge University

Press

Mcnamara , T . ( 2005 ) . Semantic Priming . New York : Psychology Press

Yule , G . ( 2006 ) . The Study of Language . Cambridge :Cambridge University Press