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Abstract:
Hungarian nouns have a rich agglutinative structure. In the
case of ambiguous N-V stems (1) this allows situations where
suffixes either disambiguate the form (3) or leave the suffixed
form ambiguous (2).
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|
(1) |
(2) |
(3) |
| N |
drum |
my drum |
-- |
| V |
throws |
I throw |
you throw |
The paper reports experiments using the crossmodal priming
paradigm with ambiguous N-V stem words (1), suffixed forms that
remained ambiguous (2), and forms where the suffix disambiguated
the original ambiguity (3). Subjects listened to digitized
sentences that ended with the priming word. After a 1OO msec
delay an associate of the relevant or the irrelevant meaning
appeared on a screen. RTs for reading the target words were used
as the dependent measure.
In Experiment I counterbalanced subgroups of 2OO students
listened to sentences with a nominal or verbal use of the
ambiguous words. Facilitation was after the relevant meaning of
the priming words and an inhibition was observed for the
irrelevant meaning even after disambiguating suffixes. That
argues for decomposition and nontrivial effects of multiple
access.
In Experiment II a similar design was used where native
Hungarian speakers who were also fluent English speakers listened
to Hungarian priming sentences and the target word was in
English. The English target word was always either an associate
of the biased or the nonbiased meaning of the priming word or a
control word.
Response latencies showed that the asssociates of both
meanings of an ambiguous word were activated in the mental
lexicon of both languages even in an unambiguous syntactic,
semantic, and language context. In other words, the processing of
an ambiguous word seemed to have automatically facilitated the
access of both of its meanings also in the other language.
Both studies support a fast morphological parsing and maybe
some effects of multiple access in Hungarian. The paper will
discuss the relevance of the results, especially the Noun-Verb
difference and the cross-language effects with regard to theories
of multiple access and modular processing.
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