Semantic growth of morphological families in English Journal Articles

abstract

• This paper explores the question of when and how morphological families are formed in one?s mental lexicon, by analyzing age-of-acquisition norms to morphological families (e.g., booking, bookshelf, check book) and their shared morphemes (book). We demonstrate that the speed of growth and the size of the family depend on how early the shared morpheme is acquired and how many connections the family has at the time a new concept is incorporated in the family. These findings dovetail perfectly with the Semantic Growth model of connectivity in semantic networks by Steyvers and Tenenbaum (2005). We discuss implications of our findings for theories of vocabulary acquisition.

authors

• Henry, Regina
• Kuperman, Victor

status

• published 

publication date

• 2013

published in

• Psihologija  Journal

keywords

• ACQUISITION NORMS
• AGE
• DUTCH
• Psychology
• Psychology, Multidisciplinary
• RECOGNITION EVIDENCE
• REPRESENTATION
• SEGMENTATION
• SIZE
• Social Sciences
• WORD-FREQUENCY
• age-of-acquisition
• morphological family
• semantic network
• vocabulary acquisition

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.2298/psi1304479h

start page

• 479

end page

• 495

volume

• 46

issue

• 4