The mental representation of derived words

Abstract

Deadjectival nominals with – sa and – mi in Japanese are both phonologically transparent and morphologically decomposable. However, whilst – sa essentially serves to form nouns out of adjectives, –mi forms function as semantic labels with specific meanings. We examined – sa and – mi nominals in three experiments, an eye-movement experiment presenting –sa and –mi forms in sentence contexts and in two word recognition experiments using (primed and unprimed) lexical decision, to investigate the nature of their form-level representations. Whilst the word recognition experiments produced the same pattern of results for – sa and – mi forms, the eye-movement experiment demonstrated clear differences: – mi forms elicited longer reading times compared to – sa forms, except when the particular meanings of – mi forms were contextually licensed. These results show how different semantic properties affect the performance of derived words that have the same type of word level representation.