The morphological impact of micro- and macro-phonotactics. Computational and behavioral analysis

This paper investigates the morphological impact of the quantitative properties of the lexicon in the decomposition of morphologically complex words by native speakers of Italian. It deals with a definition of the crucial notions of micro- and macro-phonotactics with respect to word structure, and illustrates the results of a word similarity judgment experiment, where the native speakers’ performance on morphologically complex pseudo-words was compared to the output of an activation-based model trained on the same experimental material. We discuss the hypothesis that morpholexical processing is based to a great extent on statistical preconditions that are intrinsic to the micro- and macro-phonotactics of the language