A chatterbox is a box: Morphology in German word production

Abstract

Two experiments are reported in which university students translated visually presented English words into German, while German distractor words were simultaneously presented. Distractors were morphologically related, merely form-related or unrelated to the German translations (target words). The transparency of the semantic relation between target words and morphological distractors was also varied. Morphological distractors facilitated word-translation latencies irrespective of their semantic transparency, replicating results obtained with other tasks. Thus, in German word production, effects of morphological complexity seem to be largely independent of semantics. Morphological facilitation is also not due to mere form relatedness, since phonological distractors had no impact on translation latencies, relative to unrelated distractors. Our data corroborate the usefulness of word-translation for investigating spoken word production, in particular, for morphological processing.

Acknowledgment

We thank F.-Xavier Alario, Marc Brysbaert and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Ann-Kathrin Bröckelmann for her help with the selection of materials and running the experiments.

Notes

¹Allen and Badecker (2002) propose a lemma level in comprehension which encompasses both semantic and syntactic information.

²There were two morphologically complex English words, one in Experiment 1 and another in Experiment 2. Their German translation was morphologically simple.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heidi Gumnior

Correspondence should be addressed to Heidi Gumnior, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Psychologisches Institut II, Fliedner Str. 21, Münster 48149, Germany. [email protected]