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This study presents an experimental investigation of morpheme decomposition in the visual recognition of English compounds. It discusses linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives of the mental lexicon and the role of compound recognition data in the formulation of hypotheses about lexical access and representations. / In a series of three experiments it was found that existing compounds such as "warehouse" appear to be represented in the mental lexicon as morphologically-complex full forms. On the other hand, novel compounds such as "winehouse" appear to be decomposed into their constituent morphemes in the process of word recognition. It was also found that the constraints of English orthography play a significant role in the interpretation of novel compounds. The locus of the orthographic effect, however, appears to be post-lexical. / The results of this study of compound recognition are consistent with a view of the lexicon as a self-reorganizing store of knowledge, which is characterized by cost-free storage and access.

This thesis is a study of the learning of English grammatical morphemes (copula, possessive, ING, plural, progressive auxiliary, irregular-past, regular-past, definite article, indefinite article, and the third-person-singular-present) by 31 Japanese high school students. The data were based on the results of the subjects' spoken language, which were tape-recorded and carefully investigated. The results indicated some similarities and differences between the present study and the previous L1 and L2 studies. The present study showed more similarities to the studies which dealt with Japanese subjects by both the Spearman rank order correlation coefficients and the Implicational Scaling Analysis based on Group Range. This indicates strong transfer from the Japanese language. But language transfer is not such a simple phenomena as the researchers in the Behaviorism era thought. Some methodological problems concerning the grammatical morpheme studies and possible determinants of the accuracy order of the morphemes were also discussed.

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts