Lexical conservatism in morphological and phonological processing

Konkurs/Edition: Program IDUB, Centrum Q

Instytucja finansująca/Funding Institution: Uniwersytet Warszawski

Kierownik projektu/Principal Investigator:
dr hab. prof. ucz. Bartłomiej Czaplicki

Członkowie zespołu/Members of the team:
dr hab. prof. ucz. Bartłomiej Czaplicki (Principal Investigator)
dr Canaan Breiss, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California (team member)

Opis projektu/Project description
Lexical conservatism refers to the finding that novel forms preserve elements that have precedents in a listed form in a paradigm. . It is demonstrated that the notion of lexical conservatism should be extended to cover cases that require derivational suffixes to preserve elements of inflectional endings and elements that do not stand in direct correspondence between the base and the derivative.

There are four main goals of the project: (1) designing and running a statistical analysis (e.g. Bayesian hierarchical logistic regression) complementary to the multinomial logistic regression presented as part of the project, (2) developing an analysis couched in Noisy Harmonic Grammar (a probabilistic framework using weighted constraints) that would account for the observed types of lexical conservatism, (3) designing a behavioral study with 70 participants involving a forced-choice experiment probing native speaker intuition in forming locative adjectives (using pseudo-words) and (4) proposing a theoretical framework that would be particularly well-suited to accommodate the observed patterns. 

The findings of this study will have important implications for models of morphological and phonological computation in current linguistic theories. The project will shed new light on the minimal units of lexical storage. It will provide validation of predominant models of language processing (whole-word storage vs. serial concatenation of separately stored morphemes).

Czas trwania projektu/Project duration: 2025-2026

Wysokość finansowania/Amount of funding: 35 379 PLN