On the Mental Lexicon : At the Linguistic/Psycholinguistic Interface.
Project/Area Number |
07610458
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Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
Section | 一般 |
Research Field |
英語・英米文学
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Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
Principal Investigator |
ITO Takane The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Associate Professor, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 助教授 (10168354)
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Project Period (FY) |
1995 – 1997
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Project Status |
Completed (Fiscal Year 1997)
|
Budget Amount *help |
¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 1996: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
Fiscal Year 1995: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
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Keywords | mental lexicon / rule vs.analogy / nominal suffix / dual mechanism model / brain-damaged / 語彙情報 / 派生接辞 / 語形成 / 継承現象 |
Research Abstract |
The aim of this project has been to investigate the mental/neurological mechanism involved in morphological processes, taking into consideration the results reported in psycholinguistic/neurolinguistic studies. Specifically, we examined in a joint research whether the "dual mechanism model", proposed by S.Pinker and his colleagues for inflectional morphology, is appropriate for derivational morphology. The model argues for qualitative diferences between rule-governed regular processes and associative memory/analogy-based irregular processes. We conducted two experiments, one on normal adults and the other on brain-damaged patients, where we examined differences between two Japanese nominal suffixes -sa and -mi. The result of the first experiment shows that -sa and -mi behave differently with respect to applicability to novel words and that -mi, but not -sa, exhibits the "similarity effect", demonstrating that both rule and analogy are operative in derivational morphology. Furthermore, p
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atients with a lesion in Broca's area preferred -mi over -sa on novel words while patients with a lesion in other areas exhibited a different preference pattern, which suggests that the two mental mechanisms (rule and analogy) are supported by different neurological mechanisms. These findings have significant implications both for theoretical morphology and neurolinguistics : they provide a new perspective to the theory of morphology in showing that the rule/analogy distinction crosscuts the inflection/derivation distinction, and to the study of language and brain in demonstrating that Broca's area, which is believed to be involved in "syntactic" processes, is in fact responsible for "computational" processes whether they involve phrasal/sentential-level units or morphological/word-level units. Thus our study illustrates how researches in the two fields can benefit from each other. Our study has so far not given enough considerastions on how existing words with -sal/-mi are processed, and we will continue working on this with a new series of experiments. Less
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Report
(4 results)
Research Products
(10 results)