When: Wednesday, February 28, 2024, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PMWhere: Laws 207, Mile End Campus
A presentation by our PhD student Dave Kenneth Cayado on his recently submitted thesis.
This will be hybrid event; click here to join via Zoom.
Towards a More Flexible Model of Morphological Decomposition: The Case of Tagalog Morphology
A wealth of {psycho/neuro}linguistic evidence has shown that recognition of printed words involves an early, form-based, and automatic decomposition procedure, where words like teacher are segmented into smaller meaningful units {teach} and {-er} called morphemes. This early morphological decomposition has been observed in many languages, but how such a process takes place and what linguistic factors affect it remains relatively less understood. Existing models of visual morphological processing variously assume that word edges, positional information, phonological and orthographic changes, and/or phonological variability play a critical role during this decomposition stage. In this talk, I will present a series of behavioral and magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments that systematically test how these linguistic properties affect morphological decomposition. First, I exploit Tagalog infixation to investigate whether word edges and the linear position of morphemes in printed words affect decomposition. Second, I also take advantage of morphophonological changes and variability in Tagalog [that is, nasal assimilation and substitution] to test how morphophonological changes that obscure the boundary between prefix and stem, as well as the variability of their application, modulate the way morphologically complex words are decomposed. Finally, I will discuss how data from Tagalog challenge existing models of visual word recognition.