Family size, frequency and word length effects across language borders: Dutch at the conceptual intersection of Finnish and Hebrew

Harald Baayen [1], Avital Deutsch [2], Ram Frost [2], Raymond Bertram [3], Tuomo Häikiö [3], Nivja de Jong [1], Rob Schreuder [1] and Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martin [1].
(1) Interfaculty Research Unit for Language and Speech, University of Nijmegen,and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; (2)Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; (3) University of Turku, Finland.

Recently, a new frequency component in human memory, family size, has beendiscovered to affect lexical processing in the Germanic languages Dutch(Schreuder & Baayen, 1997), English (De Jong, Feldman, Schreuder, Pastizzo & Baayen, 2001), and German (Lüdeling & De Jong, 2002). Family size is the typecount of the number of derived and compound words in which a certain stemoccurs. Whereas effects of word form frequency are often assumed to ariseduring the early stages of word identification, the effect of family size hasbeen shown to arise at the semantic level of lexical processing. This paper reports three visual lexical decision experiments, using translationequivalents in Hebrew, Finnish and Dutch. The family size effect for Dutch(Germanic, family sizes in the medium range 0-550) is replicated. Moreimportantly, family size also affects response latencies in Hebrew (Semitic,non-concatenative morphology, family sizes in the small range 0-25) and Finnish(Finno-Ugric, rich agglutinative morphology with substantial morphophonologicalaltenations, family sizes in the huge range 0-7000). The focus of this paper is on the surprising degree to which reaction times inone language can be predicted from lexical statistical properties of theirtranslation equivalents in genetically unrelated languages. Frequency in anyof the three languages under investigation predicts reaction times in any ofthem even after partialling out the effects of word length and family size.Similarly, word length is an excellent cross-linguistic predictor of responselatencies. Finally, family size emerges as a bi-directional predictor forFinnish and Dutch as well as for Dutch and Hebrew, but not for Finnish andHebrew in any direction. Since the translation equivalents in Hebrew, Finnish, and Dutch share onlymeaning but no form, these results strongly suggest that not only family size,but also word frequency and word length capture aspects of the conceptualorganization in the mental lexicon.The asymmetry in the cross-linguistic predictivty of family size is probablydue to typological distance: The productivity of Finnish morpholology exceedsthat of Hebrew morphology by several orders of magnitude, as witnessed by thedifferences in the ranges of family size counts. In terms of morphological productivity, Dutch occupies the middle ground between Hebrew and Finnish.