Processing French

Processing French presents a groundbreaking empirical study of the processing of morphologically simple and complex French words.  Peter Golato's research offers an insightful account of the lexical storage and retrieval of isolated words and words within sentences.

Processing French investigates the native-language processing of French, a language for which findings have not definitively supported a dual-mechanism account of morphological processing.  Through word- and sentence-level studies, the book accomplishes two goals. First, it offers behavioral evidence in support of a dual-mechanism processing account at the word level. In contrast to English, however, the evidence with French does not turn upon a contrast in inflectional regularity among verbs but instead hinges upon a diachronic contrast, with synchronic relevance, in the productivity of derivational suffixes among nouns.  Second, by incorporating the findings of the word-level studies into sentence-level studies, the book offers a window onto the morphological processing of displaced sentential elements, specifically morphologically simple and complex wh-moved nouns and raised lexical verbs.

"Processing French is decidedly original, and it is equally and decidedly sound.  This book makes a superb shelf reference for anybody working in psycholinguistics, first- and second-language acquisition, and the syntactic study of French...and draws some fascinating conclusions about what might really be at play in human language acquisition." -Fred Davidson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PETER GOLATO is assistant professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.