Morphological Diversity and Linguistic Cognition

Description

Morphological structures interact dynamically with lexical processing and storage, with the parameters of morphological typology being partly dependent on cognitive pathways for processing, storage and generalization of word structure, and vice versa. Bringing together a team of well-known scholars, this book examines the relationship between linguistic cognition and the morphological diversity found in the world's languages. It includes research from across linguistic and cognitive science sub-disciplines that looks at the nature of typological diversity and its relationship to cognition, touching on concepts such as complexity, interconnectedness within systems, and emergent organization. Chapters employ experimental, computational, corpus-based and theoretical methods to examine specific morphological phenomena, and an overview chapter provides a synthesis of major research trends, contextualizing work from different methodological and philosophical perspectives. Offering a novel perspective on how cognition contributes to our understanding of word structure, it is essential reading for psycholinguists, theoreticians, typologists, computational modelers and cognitive scientists.

Andrea D. Sims is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University (USA). Her recent publications include Inflectional Defectiveness (CUP, 2015), and Understanding Morphology (co-authored, Routledge, 2ed 2010). She is co-editor of the journal Word Structure and serves on the editorial board of the journal Morphology. Adam Ussishkin is a Professor at the University of Arizona (USA). His research focuses on the structure of the lexicon, morphology, and phonology. He has published in Morphology, Language, The Mental Lexicon, and Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. He is also an associate editor for Language and Speech. Jeff Parker is an Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University (USA). His research investigates inflection class systems from psycholinguistic, computational and typological perspectives. He has published in morphology journals such as Morphology and Word Structure, the psycholinguistic journal The Mental Lexicon, and the Slavic focused Slavic and East European Journal. Samantha Wray is an Instructor at Dartmouth College (USA). She focuses on spoken and written word processing for nonstandard dialects of Arabic, and other widely-spoken under-researched languages of the world, such as Tagalog. She also works on the creation and improvement of computational resources for under-resourced language varieties.