Facilitating Research of an Understudied Language: Effects of Morphological Distributional Properties on Reading
Abstract
Morphological processing has been extensively studied in English and a few European languages. For theories of morphological processing to be truly general, data from a variety of languages are needed. I examined Malay, an understudied Austronesian language that is agglutinative. A broad objective was to extend the research on morphological processing to Malay readers by investigating the impact of distributional properties of morphemes. In Study 1, I developed a morphological version of an existing Malay word database. Each word in the database was decomposed into morphemes, and a wide variety of distributional properties was calculated for each morpheme. Lexical decision latencies were collected for 1,264 words with one prefix, one root, and one suffix. Of interest, root family size and prefix length were crucial predictors of decision latencies. A facilitative effect of family size was observed, particularly in lower frequency words. In Study 2, lexical decision latencies were collected for another 1,280 words. Of these, 640 prefixed words were analyzed. Root family size, prefix family size, prefix consistency, and prefix length were crucial predictors of decision latencies. A facilitative effect of root family size, particularly evident in lower frequency words, was found in prefixed words as was observed in Study 1. A larger facilitative effect of prefix family size, prefix consistency, and prefix productivity were found in words with three-letter prefixes than in those with two-letter prefixes. Prefix productivity, a variable that is highly correlated with several distributional properties of prefixes, produced the best-fitting model to the data. These findings suggest that several distributional properties influence the salience of a prefix. In Study 3, I explored the impact of spelling-meaning consistency. Orthographic-semantic consistency (OSC) estimates were calculated for 2,287 monomorphemic words. Lexical decision latencies were collected for 1,280 monomorphemic words. Of interest, a facilitative effect of root family size and OSC were observed. I found a significant interaction between root family size and OSC in that an effect of OSC was only apparent in words with larger root families. These studies and the accompanying database serve as an example of how to facilitate studies of morphological processing for other understudied languages.