The prosodic word (ω-word), the first interface level with morphosyntactic constituents, is introduced. The chapter starts with monomorphemes and shows that lexical words are ω-words: They have a minimal weight (i.e., they are minimally bimoraic). By contrast, function words are usually not ω-words: When unfocused they are often pronounced in their reduced form and do not carry lexical stress. A review and OT analysis of the defective distribution of the inflectional prefix ge- is provided. The rest of the chapter is concerned with derivation and compounding. A distinction is made between concatenative and non-concatenative prosodic morphology. In the former, complex words are built in a recursive fashion and the morphemes can be ω-words themselves or not, the result is always a ωmax. Culminativity and syllable structure are indicators of prosodic words, as is their faculty of being elided in coordination. It is shown that inflection and part of derivation are non-moraic and do not form prosodic words, while another part of derivation and all elements of compounds always form distinct prosodic words. An OT analysis is developed that takes into account all aspects of prosodic words.

Language is the natural currency of most social communication. Until the emergence of more powerful computational methods, it simply was not feasible to measure its use in mainline social psychology. We now know that language can reveal behavioral evidence of mental states and personality traits, as well as clues to the future behavior of individuals and groups. In this chapter, we first review the history of language research in social personality psychology. We then survey the main methods for deriving psychological insights from language (ranging from data-driven to theory-driven, naturalistic to experimental, qualitative to quantitative, holistic to granular, and transparent to opaque) and describe illustrative examples of findings from each approach. Finally, we present our view of the new capabilities, real-world applications, and ethical and psychometric quagmires on the horizon as language research continues to evolve in the future.

Grammatical morphemes are used to modulate word meanings and to link words in constructions. They consist of inflections, usually suffixes, added to words, and free-standing function words (prepositions and articles). Different language-types make different uses of these, including cases added to each noun, tense and aspect markers added to each verb, and agreement markers linking nouns, adjectives, and determiners. Children have to identify each inflection, its meaning, and where it is used on each word class. They start to add modulations to their words as soon as they start to combine words (and may understand some of them before this). They use regular forms as their starting point and over-regularize irregular forms. They show some consistency in the order of acquisition for different modulations, depending on the semantic complexity of each grammatical morpheme. Semantic complexity, formal complexity, and frequency all play a role here. Children may initially rely on filler-syllables, and only later produce the relevant form. Word class plays a role here, since the choice of grammatical morphemes depends on this. Initial use of grammatical morphemes may be limited to specific words and only later extended. The same holds for agreement in gender and number.