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.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant For 254/2 to Frank Rösler, and was partially funded by grant MTKD-CT-2005-029639 from the European Commission.

We thank Pienie Zwitserlood, Stefan Rabanus, Matthias Gondan, Joana Cholin, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. We thank Mihal Raveh for her help with the Hebrew examples.

Notes

¹The linking element -s- is inserted in compounds to maintain the morphological structure. For a discussion on the functions of linking elements see Wegener (2003).

²For a discussion on whether the root or the etymon constitutes the basic unit see Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson (2001).

³It is possible that the application of different scripts reduced the orthographic inhibition usually found under these SOA conditions due to a decrease in the form overlap between primes and targets. Morphological effects could thus emerge for semantically opaque derivations.

⁴The letter v (‘vav’) in nvxl may represent the vowels /u/ or /o/; the verbal root jxl is a ‘defective’ root (see e.g. Velan, Frost, Deutsch, & Plaut, 2005) that surfaces in some verb patterns as xl.

⁵The Umlaut in German is represented by the graphemes ä, ö, and ü. These graphemes represent different phonemes than those represented by the graphemes a, o, and u, as the minimal pairs Bar (bar) – Bär (bear), losen (draw lots) – lösen (dissolve), and lugen (peek) – lügen (lie) show.