unhappiness debate-psycholinguistic research methods

[Lesley-Neuman, D.F.]

It seems that we are getting caught in an escalation of intellectual
firepower, when a look at the research literature could focus more
specifically on the issue Shannon raised.  First of all, in reference to
Tom's suggestions, it is not merely semantic priming that would be
utilized, but a variety of priming techniques.  Most important would be
that the priming be masked, so that the subject would be unaware of the
prime or of the nature of the real experimental question so as not to
bias the results.  
   The use of psycholinguistics as a research method in this case is not
only not incompatible with a review of the literature of theoretical
proposals from English diachronic phonologists and morphologists, it
actually could be a necessity.  To adequately structure a
psycholinguistic experiment, information regarding the history and the
age of the affixes could be required as background information.  For
example, if the bracketing paradox has as its origin that -ness and un-
are on the same morpho-phonological level at some diachronic stage (the
English of older speakers-who would not use the un-prefix on nouns), but
younger speakers having been exposed to modern advertising language that
uses it (Remember the "un-Cola"?)  tend to think "un + happiness"  the
psycholinguist should separate subjects by age and use it is a factor
within the statistical analysis.  Not doing so might give inconclusive
results.  The differences between older and younger speakers would
demonstrate a mini-stage in the historical process of affix integration.

   How does psycholinguistic research with agglutinating languages
better inform us?  We need to look at experiments with Hungarian,
Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish-a special issue of Language and Cognitive
Processes at the link below is a good summary of the state of the art as
of 2008, and an earlier book by Baayen & Schreuder (2003) Morphological
Structure in Language Processing is also informative.

http://www.cognitivepsychologyarena.com/books/Advances-in-Morphological-
Processing-isbn9781841698670

Ken Forster advised me, when I was consulting him some years ago about
possibly applying this line of experimentation to my African language
research, to study the literature on Finnish.  At the time it seemed
somewhat inconclusive, but I intend to keep checking back.  There are
people working in Hungarian, another vowel harmony language, so it looks
like there will eventually be some convergence of research methods in
the future.  In fact, Vannerst and Boland (1999) already successfully
tested the presence of morpho-phonological levels in English, explicitly
invoking the lexical phonology model of English.   It can be accessed at
this link:

http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~skang/371/DownloadablePapers/VannestBola
nd99.pdf




Diane Lesley-Neuman
PhD Researcher
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics/
Languages and Cultures of Africa
Van Wijkplaats 4 Office 103A
2311 BV Leiden  The Netherlands
Email: d.f.lesley-neuman.2 at hum.leidenuniv.nl
Telephone: +31 71 527-1663