Processing derived verbs: the role of motor-relatedness and type of morphological priming

ABSTRACT

There is no consensus on whether derived words are decomposed or processed holistically, and on which factors this depends. Using overt visual priming with lexical decision involving Dutch derived particle verbs, we manipulated three factors: semantic transparency of the derived words, motor-relatedness of the simple verb constituent, and type of morphological priming. Experiments 1 and 2 (using simple verbs primed by their derivations or vice versa) showed overall facilitatory morphological priming effects, independent of transparency or motor-relatedness. In Experiment 3 (using priming between the derivation and a word semantically related to its stem), only transparent motor-related derivations were primed. The combined results suggest that the processing of derivations is influenced by priming type: constituent priming (Exp. 1 & 2) may induce a bias towards a decompositional processing strategy, possibly by directing attention to the stimuli's morphological structure. The role of motor-relatedness is discussed in the context of embodied cognition theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Priming
• morphological processing
• derivations
• embodied cognition
• action verbs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Particle verb frequency should be treated with caution, as the Celex frequency counts of particle verbs are only based on the frequency of these verbs when used as a whole, not including their frequency when separated from their particles. However, no better count is available.

2. Primes and targets were presented at different lines to avoid visual aftereffects that might occur due to form overlap between prime and target.

3. Due to the fact that filler trials mimicked the characteristics of critical trials, they had to be slightly adapted compared to Experiment 1. The same was true for the pseudo-word trials.

4. Due to the fact that filler trials mimicked the characteristics of critical trials, they had to be adapted compared to Experiment 1. The same was true for the primes in pseudo-word trials.

5. Some of the studies referred to here also present the results of masked priming experiments. As the present study only deals with overt priming, we are only concerned with their overt priming results here.