David Embick’s research while affiliated with University of Pennsylvania and other places

Expectation-driven convergence occurs when speakers shift their speech to approximate the language they expect rather than observe from their interlocutor. In Wade (2022), participants produced more monophthongal /aI/—a salient feature of Southern U.S. English—after hearing other Southern-accented features. Here, by decoupling acoustic and social information with a dialect-label manipulation task, we investigate what types of cognitive associations account for this behavior: indirect socially-mediated associations that rely on recognizing that monophthongal /aI/ and other Southern-accented variants are both associated with the social category “Southern,” or direct associations between variants that rely on tracking their common co-occurrence at the individual level. We find that both acoustic and social-label cues trigger convergence, but in-group speakers from the South rely on acoustic cues, while out-group speakers from outside of the South are best cued by social-category labels. Results indicate a crucial role of dialect experience in the encoding and utilization of sociolinguistic knowledge.

This entry provides an overview and synthesis of grammatical approaches to blocking effects : informally, cases in which the ungrammaticality of one word (or phrase) is attributed to the existence of another. The primary focus concerns the scope of competition for grammaticality. While discussions of blocking are often directed at particular parts of the grammar (e.g. derivational morphology) the larger set of questions raised by (putative) blocking effects has the potential to distinguish predictions made by major theoretical movements like the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory, precisely because of the different roles they attribute to competition. This review of theories of blocking is oriented towards larger questions of this type. It also examines the apparent absence of blocking: cases in which it looks as if one form should (all else being equal) block another, yet both exist. Observations to this effect appear in early and influential accounts of blocking, where they have underappreciated theoretical consequences concerning how the ‘paradigm space' associated with words and phrases is structured. A key theme throughout the entry is whether the phenomena that have been described as blocking effects are derivative of one grammatical (or extragrammatical) mechanism, or several. While the authors conclude that the latter view is correct, part of their argument is that the focus on unity is less important than the question of what evidence for (or against) competition in a given domain would look like in the first place.

One of the basic questions in the theory of morphology concerns the nature of word formation: how morphemes are assembled into larger objects, and—crucially—whether there are distinct systems in which this occurs (lexicon versus syntax), or just one. Stative (a.k.a. “adjectival”) passives like opened in the opened door, or flattened in the metal is flattened, have provided an interesting testing ground for questions of this type. Following a period in which such passives were argued to be formed lexically, much subsequent work has developed the idea that they are derived syntactically, in fully phrasal structures. This paper examines a number of properties of English stative passives which raise problems for a fully phrasal treatment. These include (but are not limited to) (i) modification asymmetries relative to eventive passives; and (ii) interactions with un-prefixation. The generalizations that are revealed suggest that stative passives are built syntactically, but without phrasal internal structure: what I call small(er) syntax. Importantly, small structures are not tantamount to a lexical analysis; I provide a direct comparison that argues that the evidence favors the smaller type of approach. The argument for small structures has implications for the syntax of Roots that are introduced throughout the discussion.

The grammatical paradigm used to be a model for entire areas of cognitive science. Its primary tenet was that theories are axiomatic‐like systems. A secondary tenet was that their predictions should be tested quickly and in great detail with introspective judgments. While the grammatical paradigm now often seems passé, we argue that in fact it continues to be as efficient as ever. Formal models are essential because they are explicit, highly predictive, and typically modular. They make numerous critical predictions, which must be tested efficiently; introspective judgments do just this. We further argue that the grammatical paradigm continues to be fruitful. Within linguistics, implicature theory is a recent example, with a combination of formal explicitness, modularity, and interaction with experimental work. Beyond traditional linguistics, the grammatical paradigm has proven fruitful in the study of gestures and emojis; literature (“Free Indirect Discourse”); picture semantics and comics; music and dance cognition; and even reasoning and concepts. We argue, however, that the grammatical paradigm must be adapted to contemporary cognitive science. Computational methods are essential to derive quantitative predictions from formal models (Bayesian pragmatics is an example). And data collection techniques offer an ever richer continuum of options, from introspective judgments to large‐scale experiments, which makes it possible to optimize the cost/benefit ratio of the empirical methods that are chosen to test theories.

A large literature on visual word recognition has examined the role of (apparent) morphological structure by comparing suffixed (such as treatment), pseudo-suffixed (pigment), and non-suffixed (dogma) words with respect to their embeddings (treat, pig, dog). We examined the processing of these word types, as well as semantic controls, in an auditory primed lexical decision paradigm. The results show significant priming in all conditions relative to an unrelated baseline, with larger priming effects for truly suffixed words than for pseudo-suffixed and non-suffixed words. The results suggest that initial embeddings are activated in spoken word processing, and remain active in ways that do not depend on (apparent) morphological structure. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of lexical access that predict inhibition of disfavoured competitors and models that hold that attempted decomposition is driven by meaning relatedness between the carrier word and its possible embedded stem(s).

The question of whether lexical decomposition is driven by semantic transparency in the lexical processing of morphologically complex words, such as compounds, remains controversial. Prior research on compound processing has predominantly examined visual processing. Focusing instead on spoken word word recognition, the present study examined the processing of auditorily presented English compounds that were semantically transparent (e.g., farmyard) or partially opaque with an opaque head (e.g., airline) or opaque modifier (e.g., pothole). Three auditory primed lexical decision experiments were run to examine to what extent constituent priming effects are affected by the semantic transparency of a compound and whether semantic transparency affects the processing of heads and modifiers equally. The results showed priming effects for both modifiers and heads regardless of their semantic transparency, indicating that individual constituents are accessed in transparent as well as opaque compounds. In addition, the results showed smaller priming effects for semantically opaque heads compared with matched transparent compounds with the same head. These findings suggest that semantically opaque heads induce an increased processing cost, which may result from the need to suppress the meaning of the head in favor of the meaning of the opaque compound. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

This chapter looks at the most basic question for the study of morphology and the mental lexicon: whether or not words are decomposed into constituent parts. Theories of the mental lexicon range from those that generalize decomposition as much as possible to those that posit no internal structure for words; various intermediate positions are also found. The key question at the center of this overview is what it means for a word to be decomposed in the first place; as it turns out, this is a complex notion, and there are at least three independent but related questions that have been connected with it in the literature. The goal of this chapter is to distinguish these different notions of decomposition from each other, in order to both provide points of reference for understanding prior work, and to pose specific questions to be addressed in future research.

The present handbook is a state-of-the-art compilation of papers from leading scholars on the mental lexicon—the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, education, and computational cognitive science. This comprehensive collection spans multiple disciplines, topics, theories, and methods, to highlight important advances in the study of the mental lexicon, identify areas of debate, and inspire innovation in the field from present and future generations of scholars. The book is divided into three parts. Part I presents modern linguistic and cognitive theories of how the mind/brain represents words at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. This part also discusses broad architectural issues pertaining to the organization of the lexicon, the relation between words and concepts, and the role of compositionality. Part II discusses how children learn the form and meaning of words in their native language drawing from the key domains of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Multiple approaches to lexical learning are introduced to explain how learner- and environment-driven factors contribute to both the stability and the variability of lexical learning across both individual learners and communities. Part III examines how the mental lexicon contributes to language use during listening, speaking, and conversation, and includes perspectives from bilingualism, sign languages, and disorders of lexical access and production.

Recent constituent priming experiments show that Dutch and German prefixed verbs prime their stem, regardless of semantic transparency (e.g. Smolka et al. [(2014). ‘Verstehen’ (‘understand’) primes ‘stehen’ (‘stand’): Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs. Journal of Memory and Language, 72, 16–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.12.002]). We examine whether the processing of opaque verbs (e.g. herhalen “repeat”) involves the retrieval of only the whole-word meaning, or whether the lexical-semantic meaning of the stem (halen as “take/get”) is retrieved as well. We report the results of an auditory semantic priming experiment with Dutch prefixed verbs, testing whether the recognition of a semantic associate to the stem (BRENGEN “bring”) is facilitated by the presentation of an opaque prefixed verb. In contrast to prior visual studies, significant facilitation after semantically opaque primes is found, which suggests that the lexical-semantic meaning of stems in opaque words is retrieved. We examine the implications that these findings have for auditory word recognition, and for the way in which different types of meanings are represented and processed.