Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: The case of Finnish compared to Dutch and Hebrew
Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This
study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge
productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological
families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not
the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but
only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel
experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language
predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting
the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic
organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.
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