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Words and Paradigms in the Mental Lexicon by Kaidi L˜Oo a Thesis

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Words and Paradigms in the Mental Lexicon by Kaidi L˜Oo a Thesis Words and Paradigms in the Mental Lexicon by Kaidi Loo˜ A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics University of Alberta Examining Committee: Juhani Jarvikivi,¨ Supervisor R. Harald Baayen, Supervisor Antti Arppe, Supervisory Committee Herbert Colston, Examiner James P. Blevins, Examiner c Kaidi Loo,˜ 2018 Abstract This dissertation examines the comprehension and production of Estonian case- inflected nouns. Estonian is a morphologically complex Finno-Ugric language with 14 cases in both singular and plural for each noun. Because storing millions of forms in memory seems implausible, languages like Estonian are often taken to be prime candidates for rule-driven morpheme-based processing. However, not all Estonian nouns actually occur in all their 28 cases, but only in cases that make sense based on the meaning of the word. For instance, for jalg ‘foot/leg’, the nom- inative plural jalad ‘feet/legs’ is very common, whereas the essive singular case jalana ‘as a foot/leg’ rarely ever gets used. Furthermore, Estonian inflected forms cluster into inflectional paradigms, which typically come with only a few inflected variants from which other forms in the paradigm can be predicted. Hence, the number of forms that a speaker would need to memorize is much smaller than the number of forms that one can understand or produce. Based on these observations, we aimed to clarify lexical-distributional prop- erties that co-determine Estonian processing. Using a large number of items and generalized mixed effects modeling, we tested the influence of a number of lexical measures, such as lemma frequency, whole-word frequency, morphological family size, inflectional entropy, orthographic length and orthographic neighbourhood density (all calculated on the basis of a 15-million token Estonian corpus). Impor- tantly, we hypothesized that a new measure, the number of attested forms of a given paradigm, i.e., the forms that actually get used, may affect morphological processing in Estonian. We conducted four psycholinguistic experiments: two word naming tasks, a lexical decision and a semantic categorization experiment with native speakers ii of Estonian, varying in age (21-69 years). Results of the semantic categorization task with 200 inflected forms showed a facilitatory effect of inflectional paradigm size in both response times and accuracy. In the word naming, which had with similar number of items, a facilitatory effect of whole-word frequency was found. In the two remaining large-scale-studies, a lexical decision task and a word nam- ing task, with over 2,000 inflected forms, both whole-word frequency and inflec- tional paradigm size again emerged as the strongest predictors. In line with the behavioural data, eye movement data collected during the word naming task fur- ther confirmed whole-word frequency and inflectional paradigm size as the main predictors of Estonian inflected word processing. Further analyses of pupil dila- tion supported these findings, but also suggested large individual differences in processing patterns. In summary, our findings suggest a surprising amount of item-specific knowledge is available during language processing. This contradicts a purely decompositional approach to the processing of complex words, even for a language as morphologically rich as Estonian. iii Preface The research projects contained within this dissertation received research ethics approval from the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board, Project Name Lex- ical processing of complex words”, No. Pro00054925, 30 March 2015 and ”Lexical processing in Estonian”, No Pro00057626, 07 July 2015. The research conducted for this thesis was done in collaboration with other researchers. Chapter 2 is accepted for publication as Loo,˜ K., Jarvikivi,¨ J., & Baayen, R. H. (accepted). Whole-word frequency and inflectional paradigm size facilitate Esto- nian case-inflected noun processing. Cognition. I was responsible for experiment design, data collection, analysis, and manuscript composition. Dr. R.H. Baayen and Dr. J. Jarvikivi¨ were the supervisory authors, Dr. R. H. Baayen assisted with experimental design, statistical analysis, concept formation and manuscript edits, Dr. J. Jarvikivi¨ helped with concept formation and manuscript edits. Chapter 3 is accepted for publication as Loo,˜ K., Jarvikivi,¨ J., Tomaschek, F., Tucker, B. V.,& Baayen, R. H. (2018). Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects. Morphology. I was respon- sible for experiment design, data collection, analysis, and manuscript composition. Dr. R.H. Baayen and Dr. J. Jarvikivi¨ were the supervisory authors, Dr. R. H. Baayen assisted with statistical analysis, concept formation and manuscript edits, Dr. J. Jarvikivi¨ helped with experimental design, concept formation and manuscript ed- its. Dr. F. Tomaschek helped with experimental design and manuscript edits, Dr. J. van Rij helped with experimental design, and Dr. B.V. Tucker helped with statis- tical analyses and manuscript edits. The study in Chapter 4 was conducted with the assistance from Dr. J. Jarvikivi,¨ Dr. R.H. Baayen and Dr. J. van Rij. I was responsible for experiment design, iv data collection, analysis, and manuscript composition. Dr. J. Jarvikivi¨ helped with concept formation and manuscript edits, Dr. R.H. Baayen helped with manuscript edits and statistical analysis, Dr. J. van Rij helped with statistical analyses. Chapter 5 is published as Loo,˜ K., van Rij, Jacolien, Jarvikivi,¨ J., & Baayen, R. H. (2016). Individual differences in pupil dilation during naming task. In Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J. C. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Austin, TX, pp. 550-555. I was responsible for experiment design, data collection, analysis, and manuscript composition. Dr. J. van Rij helped with experimental design, statistical analyses, concept formation and manuscript edits. Dr. R.H. Baayen helped with statistical analyses, concept formation and manuscript edits. Dr. J. Jarvikivi¨ helped with manuscript edits. v Acknowledgements Funding for this dissertation was provided by the national scholarship program Kristjan Jaak, funded and managed by Archimedes Foundation in collaboration with the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research. I would also like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for support for research visits to Tubingen¨ (AvH Professur grant nr. 1141527 to R. H. Baayen), and Words in the World Part- nered Training Initiative (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada), the GSA doctoral travel fund, Kristjan Jaak Scholarship for Short Study Visit grant and travel awards by the Department of Linguistics for funding my conference visits. This dissertation and my studies at the Department of Linguistics of Univer- sity of Alberta would have not been possible without the help of many wonderful people. First and foremost, I want to thank my supervisors Dr. Juhani Jarvikivi¨ and Dr. Harald Baayen. Their guidance, patience and sense of humour have not only made this possible but also enjoyable. Juhani’s unwavering confidence in me has helped me to grow not only professionally but also personally, and I deeply appreciate all the time he has dedicated into mentoring me. Without Harald I would not have set out to pursue a PhD. His passion for research has been inspiring and I am forever grateful for all that I have learnt from him. My gratitude also goes to Dr. James P. Blevins for being the external examiner of my dissertation and for providing me insightful comments and questions on Es- tonian morphology. I would also like to thank my supervisory committee member Dr. Antti Arppe, for his questions and comments during my candidacy and de- fense as well as my external Dr. Herbert Colston for his questions and comments vi during my defense. Further, I would like to thank Dr. Benjamin V. Tucker for his help with Chapter 3 as well as Dr. Gary Libben and Dr. Partel¨ Lippus for being part of my candidacy committee. I was very fortunate to benefit from two excellent research groups during PhD. The Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics in Edmonton has been my second (if not the first) home. First of all, I owe a massive gratitude to Abigail G. Toth, the honorary fourth member of my supervisory committee. Her friendship and sup- port mean the world to me, and her careful proofreading and thoughtful comments made my whole dissertation much nicer to read. Also, a thanks to Dr. Caelan Mar- ville for making my life easier by providing me a LaTex template for this disser- tation. Finally, I would also like to thank all the lovely people at CCP and at the Department of Linguistics for helping me to stay sane through the entire process of dissertation writing. Among others, I am thankful for Anja, Bekka, Brian, Figen, Filip, Graham, Hannah, Izzy, Keely, Lauren, Lena, Lila, Nik, Stephanie, Vince and Yoichi for that. I also had the pleasure to go back to the Quantitative Linguistics Lab in Tubingen¨ multiple times during my PhD. The innovative and stimulating environment there during my Masters was something which got me interested in psycholinguistics in the first place. I would like to express my deepest thanks to Dr. Jacolien van Rij and Dr. Fabian Tomaschek, who patiently helped me through the many hurdles of experimental research. I would also like to thank Arvi, Cyrus, Petar, Tineke and Tino for making my life easier in various aspects during my visits in Tubingen.¨ Furthermore, I would like to thank Dr. Heiki-Jaan Kaalep and Dr. Fermin Moscoso del Prado Martin for their help with my corpus measures. I am also grateful to Dr. Partel¨ Lippus, Dr. Aki Kyorol¨ ainen,¨ Dr. Einar Meister and Dr. Mari Uuskula¨ for their help with the administration of my experiments in Estonia, and to all the wonderful participants who took part in my experiments. Lastly, I wish to dedicate this dissertation to my dear family and friends who have been there for me throughout this PhD.
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