Processing English Compounds in the First and Second Language:

The Influence of the Middle Morpheme

Author: Victoria A. Murphy & Jennifer HayesPresenter: Shu-ling Hung (Sherry)Advisor: Raung-fu ChungDate: May 09, 2013

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Term (1)

•A compound is made up of two or more words concatenated to form another word.

•pan and cake → pancake• taxi driver

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Term (2)

Term (2-1) Derivation is the morphological process which

creates a word with a new meaning and/or category.

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Term (2-2)

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Inflectional morphology is the changes that happen in words to denote certain grammatical features.

Introduction

• Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g., rat-eater not rats-eater) while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g., mice-eater) (Gordon, 1985; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000).

• Exposure to the input is insufficient to explain this dissociation between regular and irregular plurals in compounds because occurring compounds in English rarely have plurals of any type included within them.

• The constraint on the production of plural could be derived from the

patterns in which regular plural and possessive morphemes occur in the input.

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Literature Review

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Word +/s/

/z/

Word +/s/

/z/N. rare (the semantic

and the phonetic constraints)

plural but does not end in /s/

or /z/N. Maybe ok (the

semantic is invoked)

Haskell et al. (2003) showed that the influence of the semantic and the phonetic constraints working in tandem leads to very few plurals that end in /s/ or /z/ appearing before a noun.

Literature Review

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Haskell et al (2003) : constraint satisfaction model

rat catchermice catcher

scissors

Literature Review

• Cunnings and Clahsen (2007) took issue with Haskell et al.’s (2003) explanation of why regular plurals are excluded from English compounds and argued that an important comparison to support Haskell et al.’s (2003) model would come from compounds with nonhead nouns that are semantically and morphologically singular but yet nonetheless sound plural.

• They supported the notion that participants exclude regular plurals from compounds due to a morphological constraint.

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Purpose of the Study

• The study was to explore the extent to which these more input-based or probabilistic explanations of how plural inflectional morphology and compounding interact might account for L2 learner behavior.

• How nonhead nouns ending in the phoneme /s/ (or /z/) are treated in compounds was also tested in this study.

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Research Questions

1. Will compounds containing possessive nouns be processed more quickly than compounds containing plural nouns?

2. Will the same preferences as shown by native speakers (NSs) be manifest by nonnative speakers (NNSs) who have had considerably less exposure to the input?

3. Will compounds in which the first noun ends in /s/ (/z/), whether it is the plural form or not, be processed more slowly than compounds that do not include a first noun ending in /s/ (/z/)? Will this difference be manifested by the NNSs who have had significantly less exposure to English?

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Methodology-- Participants

Native speakers (NSs) Nonnative speakers (NNSs)

Sex Male: 1; Female: 21 Male: 5; Female: 8

Mean age 24 23

Education the Department of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire

UK university for academic study (advance-level learners of English)

Degree of L2 No No, but classroom-based foreign language instruction in China

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Methodology-- Materials and Stimuli• The frequencies of these first nouns were calculated

using the analysis in Francis and Kucera (1982).

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Methodology-- Materials and Stimuli

• The apostrophe was omitted.• Each compound was preceded by contextualizing sentence, which

a pilot study with NSs had confirmed would lead participants to the intended interpretation of the first noun in the compound.

• A dummy compound was also tested made up of two nonwords by changing the letters of the target compounds to yield a nonce compound item that was phonologically plausible in English.

• Sentences and compounds appeared centered on the computer screen in 48-point type.

• Psyscope software was used to analyze the study.

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Methodology-- Appendix

Methodology-- Procedure

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Results-- Accuracy Data

• The participants’ responses to the noun-noun compounds were coded as correct or incorrect in terms of their acceptability of the legitimate compounds in English.

• An initial repeated measures analysis of variance was carried out with Order as the independent-samples factor.

• A repeated measures multivariate ANOVA was carried out with one independent-samples factor (Group) tested at two levels (NS, NNS) and one related-samples factor (Word Type) tested at five levels.

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Results-- Accuracy Data

Over 80% accurate

over 90% accurate

The difference in errors for nonhead nouns ending in phoneme /s/ (/z/) and possessive [-s] was reliable.

Neither group had any difficulty correctly distinguishing the real words in the compounds from the nonce compounds.

Results-- Reaction Time Data

• An initial ANOVA with Order as the only independent-samples variable was carried out to determine whether Order had an influence on how quickly participants responded on the LDT.

• An overall (omnibus) F test was carried out with one independent-samples factor (NS, NNS) and one related-samples factor(Word Type).

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Results-- Reaction Time DataFor all different types of nonhead nouns, the Chinese NNSs were slower to respond on the LDT than the English NS.

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Results-- ComparisonComparisons was carried out on the NS and NNS RT data to determine the extent to which differences in responding were found across the relevant types of nonhead nouns.

quickly

input

quickly

Harder to process → less input

more longermore longer

higher than possessive & slower

higher than possessive & slower

Haskell et al.’s idea but support the suggestion

Summary• Native speakers of English processed compounds with medial

possessive morphology faster than compounds with medial regular plural morphology.

• The second language learners did not show the same pattern as the NSs, which could be due to the fact that they had considerably less exposure to the relevant input patterns relative to the NSs.

• Regular plurals may be excluded before a rightmost noun in English because the pattern “Noun–[-s] morpheme–Noun” is more frequently used for marking possession in English.

• Irregular plurals do not end in the [-s] morpheme and do not “compete” with the possessive marker. Consequently, they may be optionally included in compounds.

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Limitations of the Study

•small sample sizes →larger sample sizes

•unequal variability across groups → even number of male and female subjects

• limitations of the stimuli → different types of processing tasks and stimuli

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Comments

There are some factors that can be investigated deeply in the topic.

• How much input is required before a learner of English comes to work out the relative patterns of where different aspects of morphology appear in English grammar?

• How long does it take for a learner to learn the sequence “noun–[-s]–noun” more frequently marks possession?

• It would be profitable to use more sophisticated measures, such as eye movements.

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