چکیده:
An interesting area of psycholinguistic inquiry is to discover the way morphological structures are stored in the human mind and how they are retrieved during comprehension or production of language. The current study probed into what goes on in the mind of EFL learners when processing derivational morphology and how English and Persian derivational suffixes are processed. 60 Iranian EFL learners at intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency whose proficiency level were determined through Oxford Quick Placement Test, participated in masked priming experiments using E-prime software. Two separate priming tasks in Persian and English were conducted during the course of this study. The target words were primed in three ways: identity (careful"careful), related (care"careful) and control primes (desire"careful). Participants’ reaction times were measured by E-prime software and were fed into SPSS software for further analysis. The results indicated that Proficiency plays a role in the way derivational morphology is processed, because at lower proficiency levels more decomposition was detected while more proficient participants utilized more whole-word representation. Furthermore, Persian learners of English processing of the derived words could not be assigned strictly to decomposition or whole-word representations in the mind. What seems more plausible to assume is that highly frequent words (whether base or suffix frequency) as well as derived words with more productive suffixes are stored as whole words but lower base and morpheme frequency ones and those with suffixes having less productivity are decomposed. These findings lend further support to dual route model.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The results indicated that proficiency plays a role in the way derivational morphology is processed, because at lower proficiency levels more decomposition was detected while more proficient participants utilized more whole-word representation.
Research into the effects of variables like base and surface frequency, family size, productivity, allomorphy and phonological alternations in the stem, on lexical processing of derived words, is then a necessity.
Ford and his colleagues endeavored to figure out the effects of base frequency and family size on processing derived words and whether these variables were affected by the productivity of the affix.
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The purpose of the present research was to study how derivational morphology is processed both in English and Persian and how the factors of base frequency, surface frequency and suffix productivity play a role in such processing.
The output generated was analyzed to investigate the effect of proficiency on each of the contexts of high versus low surface frequency words each with three types of primes.
Additionally, a paired sample T-test was conducted to see whether there was any difference between the reaction times for high versus low surface frequency words without taking the role of proficiency or prime type into consideration.
The ANOVA results indicated a statistically significant difference between high versus low values of these contexts substantiating the effect of frequency on processing all derived words, Wilk's Lambda=0.
To address the second research question focusing on the effect of base frequency manipulation on derivational morphology processing, it can be said that in English, this manipulation accounts for the decomposition of derived words whose stems are less familiar to the learners.