Achievement

IGERT Trainees Kyle Gorman and Constantine Lignos have been working on the issue of how humans recognize and process morphologically complex words (such as "speech-less-ness"). The experimental literature has come to an impasse in recent years as to whether morphologically complex words are stored as whole words or stored by the pieces ("speech", "less", "ness") that they are composed of. Gorman and Lignos have performed the first large-scale study to explicit address the question of storage. They find that previous claims that high frequency complex words are stored while low frequency words are not cannot be replicated and that a number of methodological issues were responsible for the famous findings supporting that claim. They presented this work at the 2012 CUNY Human Sentence Processing in NYC.