Lexical Processing: BBS Call for Commentators

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(a)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(a)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(a)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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- (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. --------------------------------------------------------------------- (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(a)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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- (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!).