Presenters

Karen Perez Cruz, Holly Kibbins, Mohammad Barre, Chelsa Patel & Dixie Wong, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta

Abstract

Pseudo-compounds have two constituents ie. big and ram in bigram, that both do not contribute to the overall meaning of the word. Entropy measures uncertainty in the possible relations between a pseudo-compound’s constituents with high entropy showing that there are many possible conflicting meanings. Each possible meaning shows a possible relationship between the pseudo-compound’s constituents. For example, the pseudo-compound sunrise has two constituents, sun and rise, and possible relations between the two constituents could be e.g. sun CAUSES rise or sun IS rise. Pseudo-compounds with high entropy will have many conflicting possible relations. Morphological family size is the number of compounds that share the same first constituent as the pseudo-compound in question. Past research has shown a change in reaction time for compound words when they have different morphological family sizes and word frequencies. We extended on those findings using pseudo-compounds by investigating the influence of morphological family size and word frequency on the relationship between entropy and ease of processing. We hypothesized that pseudo-compounds with the first constituent from a large morphological family size would have longer response times in a lexical decision task. We additionally hypothesized that when the first constituent is used in pseudo-compounds that have a high word frequency, then they would be easier to process and therefore lead to shorter response times.

Poster

Authors & Affiliations

Karen Perez Cruz (Psychology Department, University of Alberta), Holly Kibbins (Psychology Department, University of Alberta), Mohammad Barre (Psychology Department, University of Alberta), Chelsa Patel (Psychology Department, University of Alberta), Dixie Wong (Psychology Department, University of Alberta), Alex Taikh (Psychology Department, University of Alberta), Christina Gagne (Psychology Department, University of Alberta) & Thomas Spalding (Psychology Department, University of Alberta)