Spring 2024 Colloquium - Laurel Lawyer - Getting Ahead of Prefixes

Abstract: In this talk, I present work exploring the storage of prefixes, and the processing of prefixed words.  Although much theoretical work has addressed complex words and the role affixes play in the construction of meaning (cf. Taft & Forster, 1975; Schreuder & Baayen, 1995; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 2007), nearly all of this discussion is couched in arguments about compositionality and semantic opacity.  Relatively little attention has been paid to the lexicon itself, and what the implications are for lexical access and lexical storage of words that may vary in complexity (in terms of derived and inflected words) and form (in terms of morphologically conditioned allomorphy).  Building on these notions, this talk will focus on recent work on the morphological awareness of prefixes in a complex system by showing new data on noun class categorization in Kinyarwanda, a Bantu language of Rwanda.  The case of Kinyarwanda is a particularly informative, as the multilingual nature of Kinyarwanda speakers and their performance on a metalinguistic task suggests that the details of lexical storage are neither deterministic nor static.  Taken together, this work illustrates that prefixes are not auxiliary to language processing; they’re a critical element in speech perception and our conceptualisation of the lexicon.

Event Logistics: 10am on Zoom on April 19th. [The talk will also be projected in-person in Kerr 273].

Speaker Biography: Dr. Laurie Lawyer is a Senior Lecturer in Psycholinguistics at the University of Essex in Colchester, UK.  Her research addresses language processing in spoken and signed languages, which includes work in English, French, Kinyarwanda, Mandarin, and British Sign Language.  Of particular interest is how the phonological and morphological structure of lexical items effect perception, including interfaces with syntactic structure.  She also works in acquisition, looking at phonological and lexical processing in typically developing children and children with specific language disorder.  At Essex, Laurie is on the management board of the Centre for Research in Language Development throughout the Lifespan, directs the L+PLUS EEG Lab, and was awarded PhD Supervisor of the Year for Social Sciences in 2023.