The morphological productivity of selected ... - Helda - Helsinki.fi

of ri-, and the resulting vocabulary growth curve is compared to that of ri-, it can
be seen that it in fact has a steeper curve. This tells us that it has a higher growth
rate, i.e., a higher P value. In general, it is typical for a vocabulary growth curve
to grow more steeply at lower sample sizes, because if a corpus is small, it is more
likely to encounter new, unattested types. As the corpus grows, the likelihood
decreases.
2.3.4. The psycholinguistic aspect of productivity
Attempts to measure degrees of productivity constitute only one aspect in the
study of this phenomenon. Another issue is how speakers process, storage,
retrieve and produce morphologically complex words in terms of their mental
lexicon (cf. Bauer 2001: 101, 112), and what the role of productivity is in this
schema. The primary interest of this study is not the psycholinguistic aspect of
productivity, but it is worth discussing nevertheless, since many quantitative
measures of productivity are also psycholinguistically motivated, as will be shown
below.
A crucial question at this point is whether complex words are stored
as single units or as distinct morphemes in the mental lexicon, while the latter way
involving morphological parsing. 17 The former way is more adequate from the
point of view of processing, the latter facilitates the storage of the forms
(Frauenfelder and Schreuder 1992: 166–167). In Frauenfelder and Schreuder’s
model, each complex word is simultaneously processed in both ways, the faster
route winning the race (hence the term morphological race model) (1992: 175).
Factors that influence which route will win include token frequency (high token
frequency favours the direct route) and transparency (1992: 176–177). The model
is related to Baayen’s statistical productivity measures by predicting that the
parsing route wins with transparent, infrequent words – the very properties of
words that are assumed to be of high productivity in Baayen’s model.
Relying on Frauenfelder and Schreuder’s work, Baayen (1993)
discusses the activation level A, a measure that attempts to determine which route
17 Parsing has several different (although related) senses. In this context, by parsing one means the
way speakers analyse complex words into their constituent parts (see, e.g., Frauenfelder and
Schreuder 1992: 175).
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