When semantics means less than morphology: The processing of German prefixed verbs

Abstract

This study investigated whether form and meaning relatedness modulate the processing of morphologically related German verbs. In two overt visual priming experiments, we compared responses for verb targets (kommen, come) that were preceded by a purely semantically related verb (nahen, approach), by a morphologically and semantically related verb (mitkommen, come along), by a purely morphologically related verb (umkommen, perish), or by an unrelated verb (schaden, harm). In Experiment 1, morphological relatedness produced robust facilitation, which was not influenced by semantic relatedness. Moreover, this morphological facilitation was far stronger than the priming by purely semantically related verbs. In Experiment 2, orthographically similar primes (kämmen, comb) produced interference effects and thus indicated that the morphological facilitation effects were not the result of sheer form overlap between primes and targets. These findings argue for a single system that processes morphological relations independently of form and meaning relatedness.

Sharing morphemes without sharing meaning: Production and comprehension of German verbs in the context of morphological relatives.

“…However, our results are consistent with those reported by Schreuder, Burani, and Baayen (2003), who obtained an effect of constituent frequency for transparent as well as for opaque complex words. Our results are also compatible with those reported by Schirmeier et al (2004) and Smolka et al (2009), for prefixed German verbs, and by Zwitserlood (1994a) and Libben et al (2003) for semantically transparent and opaque compounds. The implications of morphological priming effects without semantic relatedness will be addressed in more detail in the general discussion.…”

“…They argue that this lack of semantic transparency results in reduced priming for complex targets. 3 Smolka, Komlósi, and Rösler (2009) also focused on prefixed German verbs in a visual-visual priming experiment. They found strong morphological priming regardless of semantic transparency: semantically transparent (e.g., mitkommen, to come along) and semantically opaque primes (e.g., umkommen, to perish) facilitated the recognition of the target verb (e.g., kommen, to come).…”

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

“…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. One could hypothesize that this discrepancy is due to the task being used: Perhaps decomposition of opaque complex verbs was induced by the morphological priming technique (in which, e.g., a prime like reheat is followed by a target like heat) used in these studies.…”

Evidence for morphological composition at the form level in speech production

“…Hence, our data add to a growing body of evidence that the comprehension system parses complex words into their constituent morphemes (e.g., Andrews, Miller, & Rayner, 2004;Bozic, Marslen-Wilson, Stamatakis, Davis, & Tyler, 2007;Libben, Gibson, Yoon, & Sandra, 2003;Smolka, Komló si, & Rö sler, 2009;Taft, 2004;Taft & Forster, 1975, 1976. This decomposition might be restricted to early processing of compounds while whole-word representations become relevant at later stages (Frisson, NiswanderKlement, & Pollatsek, 2008;Jarema, Busson, Nikolova, Tsapkini, & Libben, 1999;Longtin, Segui, & Hallé, 2003;Zwitserlood, 1994).…”