The Development of Morphological Processing

University of Essex

British Academy Research Development Award (October 2010 - January 2012)

The project will investigate processes involved in how children and adults comprehend complex words using complementary experimental methods, including eye-movement monitoring. Our focus will be on how constraints on inflected words inside compounds affect children’s interpretation and processing of compound nouns. Results from the project will help provide a better understanding of the development of language processing in children, and will show how children’s ability to rely on different mechanisms (e.g. lexical storage vs. grammatical computation) and different information sources (e.g. morphology vs. semantics) during language processing develops over time.

Project staff

Harald Clahsen (principal investigator)

Carol Jaensch (senior research officer)

Renita Silva (senior research officer)

Kaili Clackson (PhD researcher)