Computational Approaches to Morphology

Computational psycholinguistics has a long history of investigation and modeling of morphological phenomena. Several computational models have been developed to deal with the processing and production of morphologically complex forms and with the relation between linguistic morphology and psychological word representations. Historically, most of this work has focused on modeling the production of inflected word forms, leading to the development of models based on connectionist principles and other data-driven models such as Memory-Based Language Processing (MBLP), Analogical Modeling of Language (AM), and Minimal Generalization Learning (MGL). In the context of inflectional morphology, these computational approaches have played an important role in the debate between single and dual mechanism theories of cognition. Taking a different angle, computational models based on distributional semantics have been proposed to account for several phenomena in morphological processing and composition. Finally, although several computational models of reading have been developed in psycholinguistics, none of them have satisfactorily addressed the recognition and reading aloud of morphologically complex forms