英语学习者对含有歧义性后缀的屈折词的形态加工

Morphological Processing of Inflectional Words with Ambiguous Suffixes by English Learners in China

本研究所探讨的问题是词缀歧义即一个词缀形式具有两个以上语义/句法功能这一现象是否影响中国英语专业学生对含有歧义性后缀屈折词的形态加工。研究者设计了两个词汇决策实验,分别使用40个含有歧义性后缀-ing和-er的英语单词作为实验材料对20名和24名英语专业大学生实施实验。实验结果表明词缀的歧义性导致中国英语专业学生激活对屈折词中全部词汇形态成分的提取,屈折词中词缀的语义/句法信息会影响中国英语专业学生对屈折词的加工;中国的英语专业学生通过语素表征的形式对屈折词进行加工,他们对屈折词的加工建立于对屈折词形态成分进行计算的基础之上;对词汇进行形态加工时,储存和计算这两种表征形式之间的平衡受词汇的类型、词缀的歧义性、词缀的能产性等因素的影响。在词汇决策任务中,词缀带歧义性时,中国英语专业学生会激活对屈折词的所有构词形态的内部储存而对屈折词的所有语素进行逐一计算,这样的计算过程是对带歧义性尾缀的屈折词进行加工的基本方法。

The question of the present research is to investigate whether the affixal ambiguity, the phenomenon of one affix with two or more semantic/syntactic functions could affect English majors' morphological processing of inflectional words containing ambiguous suffixes. Two lexical decision experiments with 40 English inflectional words with suffixes - ing and - er were administered to 20 and 24 English majors, respectively. The results indicate that ambiguity out of affixes induced Chinese English majors to activate the access to all morphological elements in the inflectional words and that the semantic/syntactic information of the inflectional affixes affected the processing of the inflected words by Chinese English majors. They processed inflectional words via morpheme-based representation and their processing of inflectional English words was based on the computation representation rather than storage representation. It can be seen from the experiments that regular inflection was the main prime of lexical representation for inflected words and the computation of these words was based on their morphological components. When morphological processing of words was undertaken, the balance between the two representations, i. e. storage and computation, in morphological processing is the interplay of the different factors such as word formation type, affixal ambiguity and affixal productivity. In a lexical decision task, when an affix was ambiguous, the English major triggered off all stored relevant information of it in his/her internal morphological processor to compute the morphemes one by one. Such a computation process is the basic method of processing inflectional words ending with ambiguous affixes.