The grammar behind word association tasks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0021/000436Keywords:
morphological processing, Portuguese, word association task, lexical semantics, complex wordsAbstract
Most word association tasks (WATs) focus on semantic representations but can also illuminate other linguistic phenomena (Van Rensbergen et al., 2015). This study reports a WAT comprising 152 Portuguese verbs and their corresponding compositional deverbal action nouns ending in -ção, that aims to test whether the morphological nature of the stimulus conditions the response. The results suggest that (i) the morphological structure of the stimuli does condition the response; (ii) associations can be constrained by grammatical factors other than semantics; and (iii) L1 Portuguese speakers are more likely to respond with a word belonging to the same word family if the stimulus is a complex word.
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