Predicting reaction times in word recognition by unsupervised learning of morphology
A central question in the study of the mental lexicon is how
morphologically complex words are processed. We consider this question
from the viewpoint of statistical models of morphology. As an indicator
of the mental processing cost in the brain, we use reaction times to words
in a visual lexical decision task on Finnish nouns. Statistical correlation
between a model and reaction times is employed as a goodness measure
of the model. In particular, we study Morfessor, an unsupervised method
for learning concatenative morphology. The results for a set of inflected
and monomorphemic Finnish nouns reveal that the probabilities given
by Morfessor, especially the Categories-MAP version, show considerably
higher correlations to the reaction times than simple word statistics such
as frequency, morphological family size, or length. These correlations are
also higher than when any individual test subject is viewed as a model.
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