Productivity in language production
Baayen, R. H.
(2014). Productivity in language production. In D. Sandra, & M. Taft (
Eds.),
Morphological Structure, Lexical Representation and Lexical Access: A Special Issue of Language and Cognitive Processes (pp. 447-469). London: Routledge.
Lexical statistics and a production experiment are used to gauge the extent
to which the linguistic notion of morphological productivity is relevant for
psycholinguistic theories of speech production in languages such as Dutch
and English. Lexical statistics of productivity show that despite the relatively
poor morphology of Dutch, new words are created often enough for
the marginalisation of word formation in theories of speech production to
be theoretically unattractive. This conclusion is supported by the results of a
production experiment in which subjects freely created hundreds of productive,
but only a handful of unproductive, neologisms. A tentative solution is
proposed as to why the opposite pattern has been observed in the speech of
jargonaphasics.
Publication type
Book chapter
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