Biomedical subjects

Robert Schreuder

Publications and source records attributed to Robert Schreuder.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Prosodic cues for morphological complexity: the case of Dutch plural nouns.

It has recently been shown that listeners use systematic differences in vowel length and intonation to resolve ambiguities between onset-matched simple words (Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Gaskell, 2002; Salverda, Dahan, & McQueen, 2003). The present study shows that listeners also use prosodic information in the speech signal to optimize morphological processing. The precise acoustic realization of the stem provides crucial information to the listener about the morphological context in which the stem appears and attenuates the competition between stored inflectional variants. We argue that listeners are able to make use of prosodic information, even though the speech signal is highly variable within and between speakers, by virtue of the relative invariance of the duration of the onset. This provides listeners with a baseline against which the durational cues in a vowel and a coda can be evaluated. Furthermore, our experiments provide evidence for item-specific prosodic effects.

Cues↗

PubMed2004

Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew.

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.

Cross-Cultural Comparison↗

PubMed2004

Probability in the grammar of German and Dutch: interfixation in triconstituent compounds.

This study addresses the possibility that interfixes in multiconstituent nominal compounds in German and Dutch are functional as markers of immediate constituent structure. We report a lexical statistical survey of interfixation in the lexicons of German and Dutch which shows that all interfixes of German and one interfix of Dutch are significantly more likely to appear at the major constituent boundary than expected under chance conditions. A series of experiments provides evidence that speakers of German and Dutch are sensitive to the probabilistic cues to constituent structure provided by the interfixes. Thus, our data provide evidence that probability is part and parcel of grammatical competence.

Cognition↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The subjects as a simple random effect fallacy: subject variability and morphological family effects in the mental lexicon.

This is a methodological study addressing the appropriateness of standard by-subject and by-item averaging procedures for the analysis of repeated-measures designs. By means of a reanalysis of published data (Schreuder & Baayen, 1997), using random regression models, we present a proof of existence of systematic variability between participants that is ignored in the standard psycholinguistic analytical procedures. By applying linear mixed effects modeling (Pinheiro & Bates, 2000), we call attention to the potential lack of power of the by-subject and by-item analyses, which in this case study fail to reveal the coexistence of a facilitatory family size effect and an inhibitory family frequency effect in visual and auditory lexical processing.

Auditory Perception↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The processing and representation of Dutch and English compounds: peripheral morphological and central orthographic effects.

In this study, we use the association between various measures of the morphological family and decision latencies to reveal the way in which the components of Dutch and English compounds are processed. The results show that for constituents of concatenated compounds in both languages, a position-related token count of the morphological family plays a role, whereas English open compounds show an effect of a type count, similar to the effect of family size for simplex words. When Dutch compounds are written with an artificial space, they reveal no effect of type count, which shows that the differential effect for the English open compounds is not superficial. The final experiment provides converging evidence for the lexical consequences of the space in English compounds. Decision latencies for English simplex words are better predicted from counts of the morphological family that include concatenated and hyphenated but not open family members.

Cognition↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Linking elements in Dutch noun-noun compounds: constituent families as analogical predictors for response latencies.

This study addresses the choice of linking elements in novel Dutch noun-noun compounds. Previous off-line experiments (Krott, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2001) revealed that this choice can be predicted analogically on the basis of the distribution of linking elements in the left and right constituent families, i.e., the set of existing compounds that share the left (or right) constituent with the target compound. The present study replicates the observed graded analogical effects under time pressure, using an on-line decision task. Furthermore, the analogical support of the left constituent family predicts response latencies. We present an implemented interactive activation network model that accounts for the experimental data.

Cognition↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Processing reduced word forms: the suffix restoration effect.

Listeners cannot recognize highly reduced word forms in isolation, but they can do so when these forms are presented in context (Ernestus, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2002). This suggests that not all possible surface forms of words have equal status in the mental lexicon. The present study shows that the reduced forms are linked to the canonical representations in the mental lexicon, and that these latter representations induce reconstruction processes. Listeners restore suffixes that are partly or completely missing in reduced word forms. A series of phoneme-monitoring experiments reveals the nature of this restoration: the basis for suffix restoration is mainly phonological in nature, but orthography has an influence as well.

Humans↗