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SUMMARY:The role of frequency in morphological systems - Gorazd Kert (RCEA
 L)
DTSTART:20070213T160000Z
DTEND:20070213T173000Z
UID:TALK6554@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Teresa Parodi
DESCRIPTION:In its elementary form\, the frequency effect predicts that mo
 re commonly used words are easier to recognize and are responded to quicke
 r and more accurately than less common words. Yet\, even though the freque
 ncy effect is one of the most robust and consistent findings in psycholing
 uistic literature\, and that there is very little doubt that frequency is 
 the single most important factor in determining response times to words\, 
 the full implications of the assumption that more frequent words are proce
 ssed faster and more accurately than less frequent ones\, are not entirely
  clear. \n\nOf particular interest for the role of frequency in morphologi
 cal systems is the literature accompanying the class of the so-called `dua
 l-mechanism models' that use the frequency effect as a diagnostic tool for
  distinguishing between different processing strategies that speakers use 
 in language processing. Namely\, a body of literature that adopts an infor
 mation-theory style approach to morphological processing has consistently 
 demonstrated that frequency alone is too simple a term to account for all 
 the psychologically relevant information that is available in a morphologi
 cal system.\n\nWith the increasing tendency to include psycholinguisticall
 y relevant arguments in theoretical descriptions of morphology\, at least 
 a part of the interest in morphological processing also concerns theoretic
 al descriptions of morphological systems. In this sense\, the predictions 
 of the proponents of the literature accompanying the dual-mechanism model\
 , are thought to be compatible with constructive approaches to morphologic
 al systems that build on the structuralist tradition\, while the informati
 on-theoretical approaches tend to be closer to abstractive descriptions of
  morphological systems found in the ancient models of the neo-grammarian t
 radition.\n\nThis talk sets out to tease apart the apparent similarities b
 etween the models of morphological description and models of morphological
  processing and aims to describe these similarities by assuming that frequ
 ency is a psychologically relevant measure\, and that its effect on proces
 sing may also be relevant for a number of theoretical distinctions that ar
 e drawn in descriptions of morphological systems.\n\n\n\n
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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