Morphology and the Mental Lexicon

Course content

Selfie stick, blogger, ungoogleable, ... Morphology allows us to create and understand an in-finite number of new words derived from known component parts (e.g., google-able) but have you ever wondered how we process these forms in real time? Do we analyse the morphological structure or do we ignore it? This course deals with how morphologically complex words are represented in our mind/brain and how they are processed during language comprehension and production. Combining linguistic theory and psycholinguistic research, we will explore whether forms such as walked and walker are recognised as whole forms or decomposed into their component parts (i.e., walk plus -ed/er) and how properties of these forms (e.g., inflection vs. derivation, frequency/familiarity or transparency) influence processing. After an introduction to morphological theory and processing models, we will read and discuss original research papers that put linguistic theories to the test and investigate the psychological reality of morphological structure in our mind/brain.