The cognitive reality of morphomes. Evidence from Italian

Abstract

This study reports and discusses the results of a pilot psycholinguistic investigation into the morphome – a term created (Aronoff 1994) to indicate systematic relations between form and meaning in morphology which lack synchronic semantic, functional, or phonological determinants and are thereby purely morphological.

Despite a general consensus (cf. Bermúdez-Otero and Luís 2016) on the need to approach the question of the existence and nature of morphomic structures experimentally and interdisciplinarily, there has been no study beyond Nevins, Rodrigues, and Tang (2015), which focused on the morphomic structure in Romance verb morphology identified by Maiden (1992) and labelled (arbitrarily) the ‘L-pattern’ and concluded that in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese this structure is no longer part of native speakers’ grammar.

The present study has replicated, for Italian, the basic experimental design of Nevins et al. It has obtained behavioural measurements (from two experiments) including eyetracking measures (from one experiment). All these measurements converge in showing (i) a statistically significant preference for target items that are consistent with the L-/U-pattern distribution and (ii) a faster decision-making process when the L-item was chosen. We conclude that (pace Nevins et al.) this morphomic structure is part of the internalized grammar of Italian adult speakers.