This suggests that stored word forms may play a role in morphological processing, but that morphological structure affects the processing of complex word forms independently of pure form overlap. Such partial priming effects did not occur for pseudo derivations (morafe-RAFA ‘tribe-PILE ON’) or for forms that only overlap in form (moroba-ROBA ‘fun-BREAK’). However, reaction times for the morphologically related conditions were significantly slower than the reaction times for the identity priming conditions.
In the masked priming task, prior presentation of a morphologically related prime-form (kitso-ITSE ‘knowledge-KNOW’) speeded recognition times for both deverbative classes significantly, compared to a baseline with unrelated primes (bobi-ITSE ‘spider web-KNOW’). This suggests that stored complex word forms play a role in the processing of both noun classes under investigation.
Moreover, the lexical decision experiment shows significant word-form frequency effects for both Class 1 and Class 9 derivations: the more frequently speakers encounter a word form, the faster they recognise it as a word. The findings show that frequency measures derived from the existing Setswana corpus correlate significantly with the subjective frequency ratings from the survey, suggesting that they reflect speakers’ intuitions despite being based on more formal written texts. We present results of (i) a frequency analysis for deverbative nouns in an existing corpus of Setswana (Otlogetswe, 2010), (ii) a subjective frequency rating survey with 25 participants, (iii) a visual word-non-word lexical decision experiment with 83 participants, and (iv) a masked priming experiment with 53 participants. Moreover, Setswana has "pseudo-derived nouns", which look as if they are derived from a verb, but are in fact not morphologically or semantically related to a verb (kgabo-gaba ‘large fire-pull stomach in’). Setswana Class 9 derivations are not readily segmentable into an obvious stem and affix (tsheko-seka ‘court case-stand trial’) in contrast to other noun classes such as Class 1, where the prefix mo- and suffix -i transparently indicate deverbal nouns (e.g.
This paper contributes to this debate by investigating deverbative nouns in Setswana, a Bantu language. Current research on morphological processing focuses on the question of whether the morphological structure of a complex word like neat-ness plays a role in processing or whether morphological effects can be reduced to the combined effects of shared forms and meanings (e.g. Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, UK, Keywords: Derivational processing Setswana visual word recognition masked priming. The Role of Morphological Structure in the Processing of Complex Forms: Evidence from Setswana Deverbative Nouns Naledi Kgolo1, Sonja Eisenbeiss1, Nancy Kula1 1.
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