Lexical Processing: BBS Call for Commentators
Stevan Harnad
harnad at coglit.soton.ac.uk
Wed Jan 27 15:24:08 EST 1999
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article
*** please see also 5 important announcements about new BBS
policies and address change at the bottom of this message) ***
LEXICAL ENTRIES AND RULES OF LANGUAGE:
A MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF GERMAN INFLECTION
by Harald Clahsen
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please send EMAIL to:
bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
or write to [PLEASE NOTE SLIGHTLY CHANGED ADDRESS]:
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
ECS: New Zepler Building
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/
ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/
gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals
If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and
commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates.
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the
instructions that follow after the abstract.
_____________________________________________________________
LEXICAL ENTRIES AND RULES OF LANGUAGE:
A MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF GERMAN INFLECTION
Harald Clahsen
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Essex
Colchester C04 3SQ
UK
harald at essex.ac.uk
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~harald
ABSTRACT: It is hypothesized following much work in linguistic
theory that the language faculty has a modular structure and
consists of two basic components, a lexicon of (structured)
entries and a computational system of combinatorial operations
to form larger linguistic expressions from lexical entries.
This target article provides evidence for the dual nature of
the language faculty by describing some recent results from a
multidisciplinary investigation of German inflection. We have
examined (i) its linguistic representation focussing on noun
plurals and verb inflection (participles), (ii) processes
involved in the way adults produce and comprehend inflected
words, (iii) brain potentials generated during the processing
of inflected words and (iv) the way children acquire and use
inflection. It will be shown that the evidence from all these
sources converges and supports the distinction between lexical
entries and combinatorial operations.
Our experimental results indicate that adults have access to
two distinct processing routes, one accessing (irregularly)
inflected entries from the mental lexicon, and another
involving morphological decomposition of (regularly) inflected
words into stem+affix representations. These two processing
routes correspond to the dual structure of the linguistic
system. Results from event-related potentials confirm this
linguistic distinction at the level of brain structures. In
children's language, we found these two processes also to be
clearly dissociated; regular and irregular inflection are used
under different circumstances, and the constraints under which
children apply them are identical to those of the adult
linguistic system.
Our findings will be explained in terms of a linguistic model,
which maintains the distinction between the lexicon and the
computational system, but replaces the traditional view of the
lexicon as a simple list of idiosyncrasies with the notion of
internally structured lexical representations.
KEYWORDS: grammar, psycholinguistics, neuroscience of language, child
language acquisition, human language processing, development of
inflection
____________________________________________________________
To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web or by anonymous ftp from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.
The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.clahsen.html
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.clahsen
ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.clahsen
To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either:
ftp ftp.princeton.edu
or
ftp 128.112.128.1
When you are asked for your login, type:
anonymous
Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid:
yourlogin at yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@")
cd /pub/harnad/BBS
To show the available files, type:
ls
Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example):
get bbs.clahsen
When you have the file(s) you want, type:
quit
____________________________________________________________
*** FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS ***
------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) There have been some very important developments in the
area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently.
Please see:
Science:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
Nature:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
American Scientist:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm
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(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their
Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints:
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/
It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers
available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone.
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(3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically.
Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions
archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing
Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive.
Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the
public BBS Archive:
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
(4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing
bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be
offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is
also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic
submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit
papers to:
Email: bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Web: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk
http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
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(5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review
In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal had only
been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because
of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota
will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we
treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.
(Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
impact!).
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