title: Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew.
abstract: Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.
authors.affiliation: Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK. fermin.moscoso-del-prado-martin@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Fermín
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Moscoso del Prado Martín
authors.forename: Raymond
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bertram
authors.forename: Tuomo
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Häikiö
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Schreuder
authors.forename: R Harald
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Baayen
mesh_terms: D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods