The role of category ambiguity in normal and impaired lexical processing: can you paint without the paint?

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Many words are categorially ambiguous and can be used as a verb (to paint) or as a noun (the paint) due to the presence of unpronounced morphology or “zero morphology”. On this account, the verb “paint” is derived from the noun “paint” through the addition of a silent category-changing morpheme. Past studies have uncovered the syntactic and semantic properties of these categorially ambiguous words, but no research has been conducted on how people process them during normal or impaired lexical processing. Are these two different uses of “paint” processed in the same way? Does this morphosyntactic structure have an effect on online sentence processing?

Methods

This study presents two experiments that investigate the effect of morphosyntactic complexity in categ

SUBMITTER: Lukic S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10192584 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature