Priming morphologically complex verbs by sentence contexts: Effects of semantic transparency and ambiguity

Zwitserlood, Pienie; Bolwiender, Agnes; Drews, Etta

doi:10.1080/01690960444000160

Cited by 35 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…These results are in agreement with many behavioral priming studies showing a lack of priming for morphologically complex, semantically opaque words (Feldman & Soltano, 1999;Feldman et al, 2002Feldman et al, , 2004Gonnerman et al, 2007;Longtin et al, 2003;Marslen-Wilson et al, 1994;Rastle et al, 2000;Zwitserlood et al, 2005). However, in several morphological priming studies (Luttmann et al, 2011;Smolka et al, 2009), German opaque complex verbs did give evidence of being decomposed by native speakers of German.…”

Section: Cognate Verb Subdesign: Holistic Processing Of Opaque Complesupporting

confidence: 81%

Embodied language in first- and second-language speakers: Neural correlates of processing motor verbs

et al. 2014

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a b s t r a c tThe involvement of neural motor and sensory systems in the processing of language has so far mainly been studied in native (L1) speakers. In an fMRI experiment, we investigated whether non-native (L2) semantic representations are rich enough to allow for activation in motor and somatosensory brain areas. German learners of Dutch and a control group of Dutch native speakers made lexical decisions about visually presented Dutch motor and non-motor verbs. Region-of-interest (ROI) and whole-brain analyses indicated that L2 speakers, like L1 speakers, showed significantly increased activation for simple motor compared to non-motor verbs in motor and somatosensory regions. This effect was not restricted to Dutch-German cognate verbs, but was also present for non-cognate verbs. These results indicate that L2 semantic representations are rich enough for motor-related activations to develop in motor and somatosensory areas.

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Section: Cognate Verb Subdesign: Holistic Processing Of Opaque Complesupporting

confidence: 81%

Embodied language in first- and second-language speakers: Neural correlates of processing motor verbs

et al. 2014

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“…Similar contrasts have been found for French (Longtin, Segui, & Hallé, 2003) and Polish (Reid & Marslen-Wilson, 2003). Other studies, however, found (crossmodal) priming effects for both transparent and opaque derived word forms (e.g., Zwitserlood, Bolwiender, & Drews, 2005). Likewise, in masked priming experiments in which prime words are only presented for a short period of time of 30 to 60ms (Longtin et al, 2003;Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004), some studies reported significant priming effects for semantically transparent derived pairs and reduced priming effects for semantically opaque derived prime words (Diependaele, Sandra, & Grainger, 2005;Feldman, O'Connor, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2009).…”

Section: Previous Experimental Researchmentioning

confidence: 60%

The mental representation of derived words

Clahsen¹,

Ikemoto

2012

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Deadjectival nominals with -sa and -mi in Japanese are both phonologically transparent and morphologically decomposable. However, whilst -sa essentially serves to form nouns out of adjectives, -mi forms function as semantic labels with specific meanings. We examined -sa and -mi nominals in three experiments, an eye-movement experiment presenting -sa and -mi forms in sentence contexts and in two word recognition experiments using (primed and unprimed) lexical decision, to investigate the nature of their form-level representations. Whilst the word recognition experiments produced the same pattern of results for -sa and -mi forms, the eye-movement experiment demonstrated clear differences: -mi forms elicited longer reading times compared to -sa forms, except when the particular meanings of -mi forms were contextually licensed. These results show how different semantic properties affect the performance of derived words that have the same type of word level representation.Derived words have linguistic properties of both lexical entries and combinatorial grammatical processes. On the one hand, the products of derivational processes take on a linguistic life of their own in that they typically have their own grammatical properties and meanings, much like morphologically simplex words which have particular meanings and forms stored in lexical entries. On the other hand, derived words have internal morphological structure, which is arguably a result of rule-like grammatical operations. Consider, for example, deadjectival nouns such as agility, reality, curiosity. Although -ity formations are largely unproductive, lexically restricted to adjectives of Latin or Greek origin, and convey 148 Harald Clahsen and Yu Ikemoto abstract meanings that are not always predictable from their component parts, -ity derivation yields a morphologically structured word form consisting of an adjectival stem with a shortened penultimate vowel (compare agile -agility) and a segmentable suffix.The present study investigates the precise interplay of whole-word level and morphologically structured representations during the processing of derived words. It also contributes to experimental research on derivational morphology across typologically different languages, by providing new experimental findings from Japanese, a non-Indo-European language with purely agglutinating morphology. The specific case we examined, -sa and -mi nominalizations in Japanese, is particularly advantageous for the purpose of this study, as these two derivational processes have identical form-level but different semantic/functional properties. On the basis of results from different experiments which test the recognition of derived words both as single word forms and in sentential contexts, we show how meaning-related properties of derived words affect their online processing and how these can be dissociated from effects of their form-level representations.

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“…This influence was strongest in the earliest reading time measures. Other studies have also investigated this issue, but the results have proven inconsistent (de Almeida & Libben, 2005;Gagné, Spalding, & Gorrie, 2005;Pollatsek, Drieghe, Stockall, & de Almeida, 2010;Zwitserlood, Bolwiender, & Drews, 2005). It is thus unclear whether predictions of morphological structure are made from semantic context.…”

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confidence: 93%