Papers by Eileen Waegemaekers
Cognition, 2019
This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption t... more This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption that individual morphemes of multimorphemic words are represented according to a hierarchical structure. The results here support the psychological reality behind this assumption: Recognition of trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]) was significantly facilitated by prior processing of their substrings when the substrings served as morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), but not when the substrings were not morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., kindness). This morphological structural priming occurred independently of the linear positions of morphological constituents.
Contact varieties that emerge in societies where multilingualism is the norm provide an ideal tes... more Contact varieties that emerge in societies where multilingualism is the norm provide an ideal testing ground to study cognitive constraints on language change. One of these constraints is salience, which has been argued to be an important factor in determining whether a feature gets adopted or discarded in a contact variety (Aboh and Ansaldo 2006; Siemund and Kintana 2008). However, the notion of salience is problematic as it is an extremely broad concept causing scholars to each adopt slightly different definitions which are not always applicable cross-linguistically. In this paper, a new approach is put forward that quantifies semantic salience as the relative contribution of an individual word to the overall meaning of the sentence, coined as semantic load. Models that apply principles of distributional and compositional semantics have shown success in capturing meanings of words (Erk 2012). Hence, a recursive neural network (RNN) is employed that incorporates these principles in...
The present study investigates the encoding of motion in Japanese motion verbs. Kita (1999) claim... more The present study investigates the encoding of motion in Japanese motion verbs. Kita (1999) claimed that two Japanese motion verbs hairu ‘enter’ and deru ‘exit’ do not encode motion in transition but only encode change of state. Thus, hairu would not mean ‘enter’ but rather means ‘become inside’. Tsujimura (2002) replied to Kita (1999) by stating that his arguments do not hold and that these motion verbs pattern like other motion verbs, i.e. they encode transition. However, Tsujimura (2002) proposes another analysis of Japanese motion verbs whereby verbs that occur in transitive-intransitive pairs have properties of verbs of putting alongside their directed motion semantics, i.e. they can be interpreted in two ways. Other motion verbs that do not have a transitive counterpart do not display this putting verb semantics. This study aims at disentangling these two accounts by means of an acceptability judgment task in which participants judge sentences as descriptions of video clips. A...
Studies in Second Language Acquisition
The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 ... more The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 processing, L2 language processing generally underuses grammatical information, prioritizing nongrammatical information. Specifically, this cross-modal priming study tests SSH at the level of morphology, investigating whether late advanced L2 learners construct hierarchically structured representations for trimorphemic derived words during real-time processing as native speakers do. Our results support SSH. In lexical decision on English trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]), L1 recognition of the targets was facilitated by their bimorphemic morphological-structural constituent primes (e.g., unkind), but not by their bimorphemic nonconstituent primes (e.g., kindness), which were only semantically and formally related to the target. In contrast, L2 recognition was equally facilitated by both constituent and nonconstituent primes. These results suggest that unlike L1 ...
Studies in Second Language Acquisition
The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 ... more The present study tests the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), which claims that compared to L1 processing, L2 language processing generally underuses grammatical information, prioritizing nongrammatical information. Specifically, this cross-modal priming study tests SSH at the level of morphology, investigating whether late advanced L2 learners construct hierarchically structured representations for trimorphemic derived words during real-time processing as native speakers do. Our results support SSH. In lexical decision on English trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]), L1 recognition of the targets was facilitated by their bimorphemic morphological-structural constituent primes (e.g., unkind), but not by their bimorphemic nonconstituent primes (e.g., kindness), which were only semantically and formally related to the target. In contrast, L2 recognition was equally facilitated by both constituent and nonconstituent primes. These results suggest that unlike L1 ...
Cognition, 2019
This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption t... more This cross-modal priming study is one of the first to empirically test the long-held assumption that individual morphemes of multimorphemic words are represented according to a hierarchical structure. The results here support the psychological reality behind this assumption: Recognition of trimorphemic words (e.g., unkindness or [[un-[kind]]-ness]) was significantly facilitated by prior processing of their substrings when the substrings served as morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., unkind), but not when the substrings were not morphological constituents of the target words (e.g., kindness). This morphological structural priming occurred independently of the linear positions of morphological constituents.
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Papers by Eileen Waegemaekers