Do Lemmas Speak German? A Verb Position Effect in German Structural Priming

Abstract

Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb-structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb position (encoded by tense and aspect), and verb overlap. Abstract structural priming was found, both within and across verb position, but priming was larger when the verb position was the same between prime and target. Priming was boosted by verb overlap, but there was no interaction with verb position. The results can be explained by a lemma model where tense and aspect are linked to structural choices in German. Since the architecture of this lemma model is not consistent with results from English, a connectionist model was developed which could explain the cross-linguistic variation in the production system. Together, these findings support the view that language learning plays an important role in determining the nature of structural priming in different languages.

Putting things in new places: Linguistic experience modulates the predictive power of placement verb semantics

“…Chang, Baumann, Pappert, & Fitz, 2014;Flecken, Gerwien, Carroll, & von Stutterheim, 2015;Jaeger & Norcliffe, 2009, for language production). Moreover, our study provides a methodological improvement by testing participants in their second language rather than their native language.…”

Input and Age‐Dependent Variation in Second Language Learning: A Connectionist Account

“…'s study (Chang, Dell, & Bock, ). Second, the model can learn typologically different languages (Chang, Baumann, Pappert, & Fitz, ) and, in particular, it has been shown to be able to learn and explain various Japanese phenomena (Chang, ), which is a verb‐final case‐marked language like Korean. Finally the model uses linguistic input to make small changes to its morphosyntactic knowledge within a limited capacity memory and this means that the knowledge that it learns for different rules may compete with or support learning of new rules (Fitz, Chang, & Christiansen, ; Twomey et al., ).…”

Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances

“…Chang, Baumann, Pappert, and Fitz (2015) found that German-speaking participants showed stronger priming effects when constructing verb-second sentences from a list of words (e.g., uberreichen Pförtner Schlüssel Mitarbeiter [hand doorman key co-worker]) after listening to prime sentences that were also verb-second (e.g., Die Großmutter schickt ihrem Enkel ihr Testament [The grandmother sends her grandson her will] than after prime sentences that were verb-final ( Die Großmutter hat ihrem Enkel ihr Testament geschickt [literally, The grandmother has her grandson her will sent]. That is, the priming effect was larger when verb position matched between prime and target than when it mismatched.…”