Asymmetries in the processing of affixed words in Bengali

Prefixes and suffixes display distinctive linguistic behaviors. Not only does a crosslinguistic asymmetry exist between them in terms of structural properties, combinatorial constraints, and frequency, but there is also extensive evidence that prefixes and suffixes are processed differently. To furt...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language (Baltimore) 2021-09, Vol.97 (3), p.599-628
Main Authors: Wynne, Hilary S. Z, Kotzor, Sandra, Zhou, Beinan, Schuster, Swetlana, Lahiri, Aditi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affixes
Asymmetry
Bengali
Derivation (Morphology)
Morphemes
Morphology
Prefixes
Priming
Roots (Morphology)
Salience
Suffixes
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Summary:Prefixes and suffixes display distinctive linguistic behaviors. Not only does a crosslinguistic asymmetry exist between them in terms of structural properties, combinatorial constraints, and frequency, but there is also extensive evidence that prefixes and suffixes are processed differently. To further investigate the differences in how prefixes and suffixes are processed, we conducted five crossmodal priming experiments in Bengali, a language rich in derivational morphology. Although all combinations of stems, prefixes, and suffixes provided facilitation, we found that stems primed related prefixed forms to a greater degree than they primed related suffixed forms. Furthermore, morphologically related prefixed forms primed other prefixed forms more than suffixed forms primed related suffixed forms. On the basis of these findings, we propose that the asymmetry in how prefixes and suffixes are processed is due not only to differences in perception, reading, and inhibition from the phonological cohort, but also to the salience of the morpheme boundaries in affixed word representations during recognition.
ISSN:0097-8507
1535-0665
1535-0665
DOI:10.1353/lan.2021.0048