Biomedical subjects

Harald Baayen

Publications and source records attributed to Harald Baayen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Probability in the grammar of German and Dutch: interfixation in triconstituent compounds.

This study addresses the possibility that interfixes in multiconstituent nominal compounds in German and Dutch are functional as markers of immediate constituent structure. We report a lexical statistical survey of interfixation in the lexicons of German and Dutch which shows that all interfixes of German and one interfix of Dutch are significantly more likely to appear at the major constituent boundary than expected under chance conditions. A series of experiments provides evidence that speakers of German and Dutch are sensitive to the probabilistic cues to constituent structure provided by the interfixes. Thus, our data provide evidence that probability is part and parcel of grammatical competence.

Cognition↗

PubMed2002

Morphology by itself in planning the production of spoken words.

The authors report a study in Dutch that used an on-line preparation paradigm to test the issue of semantic dependency versus morphological autonomy in the production of polymorphemic words. Semantically transparent complex words (like input in English) and semantically opaque complex words (like invoice) showed clear evidence of morphological structure in word-form encoding, since both exhibited an equally large preparation effect that was much greater than that for morphologically simple words (like insect). These results suggest that morphemes may be planning units in the production of complex words, without making a semantic contribution, thereby supporting the autonomy view. Language production establishes itself as a domain in which morphology may operate "by itself' (Aronoff, 1994) without recourse to meaning.

Humans↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The recognition of reduced word forms.

This article addresses the recognition of reduced word forms, which are frequent in casual speech. We describe two experiments on Dutch showing that listeners only recognize highly reduced forms well when these forms are presented in their full context and that the probability that a listener recognizes a word form in limited context is strongly correlated with the degree of reduction of the form. Moreover, we show that the effect of degree of reduction can only partly be interpreted as the effect of the intelligibility of the acoustic signal, which is negatively correlated with degree of reduction. We discuss the consequences of our findings for models of spoken word recognition and especially for the role that storage plays in these models.

Cognition↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Processing reduced word forms: the suffix restoration effect.

Listeners cannot recognize highly reduced word forms in isolation, but they can do so when these forms are presented in context (Ernestus, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2002). This suggests that not all possible surface forms of words have equal status in the mental lexicon. The present study shows that the reduced forms are linked to the canonical representations in the mental lexicon, and that these latter representations induce reconstruction processes. Listeners restore suffixes that are partly or completely missing in reduced word forms. A series of phoneme-monitoring experiments reveals the nature of this restoration: the basis for suffix restoration is mainly phonological in nature, but orthography has an influence as well.

Humans↗