[PS-2.1] The effect of Base Frequency and affix productivity in Spanish

Lázaro, M.

University of Castilla la Mancha

The effect of Base Frequency (BF) is very important to morphological processing because it suggests that morphologically related words share morphemic representations. This (facilitatory) effect has been observed in the case of inflectional and derivational morphology. However, concerning derivational morphology, some authors propose that the effect of BF only appears when productive affixes are concatenated to stems, so the effect of BF would depend on the productivity of affixes. This would mean that only productive affixes are represented in the lexicon. There is evidence consistent with this claim in Dutch and English, but not in Spanish for instance. There are reasons to suggest that differences between languages play an important role on this issue. It is well known that Spanish or Italian languages are phonetically transparent, but Dutch and English are opaque in this sense. Does this difference play any role in the study of BF and affix productivity? The answer could be “yes” if we consider that readers of shallow orthographies rely more on sublexical cues than readers of deep orthographies, and there is some evidence showing it. All in all, it seems to be the case that only productive affixes are stored independently of whole words in languages like Dutch or English, but phonetic differences between these languages and Spanish lead us to hypothesise that the BF effect in Spanish is independent of affix productivity. Our prediction is that affixes in Spanish are represented in the lexicon no matter whether they are low or high productive ones. In order to study this hypothesis we carry out an experiment in which participants are presented to high and low BF words and high and low productive affixes while key variables like family size are controlled.