Cover not available

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. 253–284

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Long-lag morphological priming and inflectional paradigm size effects in Estonian and Finnish text reading

ORCiD logo with link | University of Tartu
ORCiD logo with link | University of Turku
ORCiD logo with link | McMaster University
Published online: 1 April 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24035.loo
Abstract
Morphological priming and paradigm size effects have been established in single word reading studies, however, morphological priming effects in longer texts have not been observed, and, to the best of our knowledge, paradigmatic effects in text reading have not yet been examined. The current study utilized the Multilingual Eye-Tracking Corpus MECO (Siegelman, N., Schroeder, S., Acartüirk, C., Ahn, H.-D., Alexeeva, S., Amenta, S., Bertram, R., Bonandrini, R., Brysbaert, M., Chernova, D., et al. (2022). Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The multilingual eye-movement corpus. Behavior Research Methods, 54(6), 2843–2863. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to explore paradigmatic and morphological priming effects during text reading in Estonian and Finnish, two morphologically rich Finno-Ugric languages. The results showed clear inflectional paradigm size effects for Estonian during text reading in several eye movement measures, but not for Finnish. This may be linked to the support from the inflectional paradigm being semantically more beneficial to the reader in Estonian than in Finnish. The current study also showed clear long-lag inflectional priming effects in text reading, unlike what was observed in prior studies in Dutch, English, and Spanish. This study is thus the first to show that inflectional priming can extend beyond word or sentence level and suggest that inflectional variants of a particular word in Estonian and Finnish get and remain activated even when text context is present.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Estonian and Finnish inflection
    • 1.2Inflectional priming in single word studies
    • 1.3Paradigmatic effects in single words studies
    • 1.4Morphological priming and paradigmatic effects in sentence and text reading context
    • 1.5The current study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials
    • 2.3Procedure
  • 3.Analyses
    • 3.1Predictor and response variables
    • 3.2Collinearity
    • 3.3Modelling strategy
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Estonian gaze duration
    • 4.2Estonian total fixation duration
    • 4.3Estonian rereading
    • 4.4Finnish gaze duration
    • 4.5Finnish total fixation duration
    • 4.6Finnish rereading
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • References
References (47)
References
Amenta, S. & Crepaldi, D. (2012). Morphological processing as we know it: an analytical review of morphological effects in visual word identification. Frontiers in Psychology, 31. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H. & Linke, M. (2020). An introduction to the generalized additive model. In S. T. Gries & M. Paquot (Eds.), A practical handbook of corpus linguistics. Springer, Berlin.(forthcoming). Springer, Berlin. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Milin, P., Filipovic Durdjevic, D., Hendrix, P., & Marelli, M. (2011). An amorphous model for morphological processing in visual comprehension based on naive discriminative learning. Psychological Review, 118(3), 438–481. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Vasishth, S., Bates, D., & Kliegl, R. (2017). The cave of shadows. addressing the human factor with generalized additive mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language, 561, 206–234. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bertram, R. & Hyönä, J. (2023). The importance of eye movement research for gaining insight into morphological processing. In Linguistic Morphology in the Mind and Brain (pp. 121–136). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bertram, R., Hyönä, J., & Laine, M. (2000). The role of context in morphological processing: Evidence from Finnish. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15(4–5), 367–388. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cop, U., Dirix, N., Drieghe, D., & Duyck, W. (2017). Presenting geco: An eyetracking corpus of monolingual and bilingual sentence reading. Behavior Research Methods, 491, 602–615. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dann, K. M., Veldre, A., & Andrews, S. (2021). Morphological preview effects in english are restricted to suffixed words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(8), 1338.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Jong, N. H., Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Morphological resonance in the mental lexicon. In R. H. Baayen & R. Schreuder (Eds.), Morphological structure in language processing (pp. 65–88). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deutsch, C. A., Tewksbury, J. J., Tigchelaar, M., Battisti, D. S., Merrill, S. C., Huey, R. B., & Naylor, R. L. (2018). Increase in crop losses to insect pests in a warming climate. Science, 361(6405), 916–919. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Feldman, L. B. (1994). Beyond orthography and phonology: Differences between inflections and derivations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33(4), 442–470. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Feldman, L. B. & Bentin, S. (1994). Morphological analysis of disrupted morphemes: Evidence from Hebrew. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 47(2), 407–435. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Feldman, L. B. & Milin, P. (2018). Psycholinguistic studies of word morphology and their implications for models of the mental lexicon and lexical processing. In Morphological Processing and Literacy Development (pp. 16–47). Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fox, J. & Weisberg, S. (2019). An R Companion to Applied Regression. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage, third edition.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Friedman, L. & Wall, M. (2005). Graphical views of suppression and multicollinearity in multiple regression. The American Statistician, 591, 127–136. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hastie, T. & Tibshirani, R. (1990). Generalized additive models. Wiley Online Library.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Henderson, L., Wallis, J., & Knight, D. (1984). Morphemic structure and lexical access. Attention and performance, (pp. 211–226).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kaalep, H.-J. & Muischnek, K. (2005). The corpora of estonian at the university of tartu: the current situation. In Proceedings of the Second Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (pp. 267–272).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kamienkowski, J. E., Carbajal, M. J., Bianchi, B., Sigman, M., & Shalom, D. E. (2018). Cumulative repetition effects across multiple readings of a word: Evidence from eye movements. Discourse Processes, 55(3), 256–271. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Karlsson, F. (1986). Frequency considerations in morphology. STUF-Language Typology and Universals, 39(1–4), 19–28. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2015). Finnish: An Essential Grammar, 3rd edition. (Routledge Essential Grammars). London & New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuperman, V. (2022). A cross-linguistic study of spatial parameters of eye-movement control during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 48(11), 1213.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Laine, M. & Virtanen, P. (1999). WordMill Lexical Search Program. University of Turku, Finland: Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lõo, K., Järvikivi, J., & Baayen, R. H. (2018a). Whole-word frequency and inflectional paradigm size facilitate Estonian case-inflected noun processing. Cognition, 1751, 20–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lõo, K., Järvikivi, J., Tomaschek, F., Tucker, B. V., & Baayen, R. H. (2018b). Production of estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects. Morphology, 281, 71–97. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lõo, K., Tomaschek, F., Lippus, P., & Tucker, B. V. (2023). Paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in estonian spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 66(2), 474–499. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lõo, K., Toth, A., Karaca, F., & Järvikivi, J. (2022). Morphological processing is gradient not discrete in L1 and L2 English masked priming. The Mental Lexicon, 17(1), 76–103. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Milin, P., Kuperman, V., Kostić, A., & Baayen, R. H. (2009). Paradigms bit by bit: an information-theoretic approach to the processing of paradigmatic structure in inflection and derivation. In J. P. Blevins & J. Blevins (Eds.), Analogy in grammar: form and acquisition (pp. 214–252). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., Bertram, R., Häikiö, T., Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2004). Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: The case of Finnish compared to Dutch and Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 301, 1271–1278.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., Kostić, A., & Baayen, R. H. (2004). Putting the bits together: An information theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition, 941, 1–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mousikou, P. & Schroeder, S. (2019). Morphological processing in single-word and sentence reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(5), 881.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Müante, T. F., Say, T., Clahsen, H., Schiltz, K., & Kutas, M. (1999). Decomposition of morphologically complex words in English: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Cognitive Brain Research, 7(3), 241–253. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paterson, K. B., Alcock, A., & Liversedge, S. P. (2011). Morphological priming during reading: Evidence from eye movements. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26(4–6), 600–623. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Raveh, M. (2002). The contribution of frequency and semantic similarity to morphological processing. Brain and Language, 81(1–3), 312–325. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Raveh, M. & Rueckl, J. G. (2000). Equivalent effects of inflected and derived primes: Long-term morphological priming in fragment completion and lexical decision. Journal of Memory and Language, 42(1), 103–119. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Münte, T. F., & Clahsen, H. (2002). Morphological priming in Spanish verb forms: An erp repetition priming study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(3), 443–454. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Royle, P., Drury, J. E., Bourguignon, N., & Steinhauer, K. (2012). The temporal dynamics of inflected word recognition: A masked erp priming study of french verbs. Neuropsychologia, 50(14), 3542–3553. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schmidtke, D., Van Dyke, J. A., & Kuperman, V. (2021). Complex: An eye-movement database of compound word reading in. Behavior Research Methods, 531, 59–77. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schreuder, R. & Baayen, R. H. (1997). How complex simplex words can be. Journal of Memory and Language, 371, 118–139. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Siegelman, N., Schroeder, S., Acartüirk, C., Ahn, H.-D., Alexeeva, S., Amenta, S., Bertram, R., Bonandrini, R., Brysbaert, M., Chernova, D., et al. (2022). Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The multilingual eye-movement corpus. Behavior Research Methods, 54(6), 2843–2863. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stanners, R. F., Neiser, J. J., Hernon, W. P., & Hall, R. (1979). Memory representation for morphologically related words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 181, 399–412. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tomaschek, F., Hendrix, P., & Baayen, R. H. (2018). Strategies for addressing collinearity in multivariate linguistic data. Journal of Phonetics, 711, 249–267. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Viitso, T.-R. (2007). Estonian language, chapter Structure of the Estonian language: Phonology, morphology and word formation, (pp. 9–92). Estonian Academy Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weyerts, H., Muinte, T. F., Smid, H. G., & Heinze, H.-J. (1996). Mental representations of morphologically complex words: an event-related potential study with adult humans. Neuroscience Letters, 206(2–3), 125–128. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wood, S. N. (2017). Generalized additive models: an introduction with R. CRC press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Nojonen, Tapio, Kiia Korsu, Filip Ginter, Veronika Laippala & Jenna Kanerva
2025. TCBLex - A lexical database of Finnish literary texts for children. Behavior Research Methods 57:11 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue