ELTE BTK Magyar Nyelvtudományi és Finnugor Intézet

Pléh Csaba

nyomtatható változat

Pléh, Csaba (Budapest)

Agglutination,  word recognition and sentence procesing:  What do we learn from psycholingustics experience about typological peculiarities


The talk shall concentrate on two issues of language processing in Hungarian. Fist, experiments using gating, priming, and lexical decision shall be presented that study the role of word internal structure in word processing in Hungarian., Some of the studies indicate a clear ’bathtub’ effect. That is both the beginning and the end of words are important in Hungarian. The studies also revealed that in processing complex multimorphemic words, the parser is assisted by the information structure of the words: sudden change in  entropy facilitate word and morpheme recognition as well.

Sentence processing experiments shall be presented that support the idea that in Hungarian  sentence understanding  the first path decisions are mainly based on morphology, and there is a strong localistic bias in processing.in contrast, in English and other configurational languages, there is a more holistic  model of sentence processing.

The results shall be interpreted by emphasizing that these typological differences imply  alternative ways of using universal psychological resources in sentence processing such  as working memory.