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Article published In: The Representation and Processing of Morphologically Complex Words
Edited by Lori Buchanan and Roberto G. de Almeida
[The Mental Lexicon 19:2] 2024
► pp. 224–252

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The synchronic status of historical bound roots in the mental lexicon

A dynamic, psychocentric perspective

ORCiD logo with link | The Pennsylvania State University
 | The Pennsylvania State University
Published online: 6 February 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24032.car
Abstract
Many English words contain historical roots that do not occur as free morphemes (e.g., nov in innovate, dict in verdict). These words often retain an appearance of compositionality and are associated with effects on lexical processing (Pastizzo, M. J., & Feldman, L. B. (2004). Morphological processing: A comparison between free and bound stem facilitation. Brain and Language, 90(1–3), 31–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Taft, M., & Forster, K. I. (1975). Lexical storage and retrieval of prefixed words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14(6), 638–647. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), but frequently their roots are difficult to identify without recourse to historical etymologies, and they are semantically opaque and unproductive. More practically, although such words are prominent in academic vocabulary, they are often difficult to learn, and instruction inspired by their apparent morphological structure has yielded mixed results (McKeown, M. G., Crosson, A. C., Moore, D. W., & Beck, I. L. (2018). Word knowledge and comprehension effects of an academic vocabulary intervention for middle school students. American Educational Research Journal, 55(3), 572–616. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). We explore these psycholinguistic and educational challenges through a dynamic view of the mental lexicon ( (2022). From lexicon to flexicon: The principles of morphological transcendence and lexical superstates in the characterization of words in the mind. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 41. [URL]. ), understanding morphological resources as gradient, emergent, and contextually adaptable for meaning making. We quantified bound roots’ morphological families by training an unsupervised parser on a lexicon approximating that of an educated English user, and then assessing polysemy and coherence of roots’ meanings, using vector semantic representations. Testing against behavioral data supported the validity of these measures, suggesting new ways of measuring the properties of bound roots independent from etymological data and demonstrating sensitivity even to unproductive morphological structure, that can support academic vocabulary development and meaning-making.
Article outline
  • The Synchronic Status of Historical Bound Roots in the Mental Lexicon: A Dynamic, Psychocentric Perspective
  • Study 1: Unsupervised parsing and semantic analysis
    • Methods
      • Sample
      • Unsupervised parsing
      • Bound root semantics
    • Results
  • Study 2: Comparison with behavioral data
    • Methods
    • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (74)
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Plag, Ingo, Maria Heitmeier & Frank Domahs
2025. Morpho-phonology is not independent of semantics. The Mental Lexicon DOI logo

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