![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing in the visual and auditory modality. French and German adults performed a visual and auditory lexical decision task that involved the same translation-equivalent items. The focus of the study was on nonwords, which were constructed in a way that made it possible to independently investigate the role of stems and suffixes in the visual and auditory domain. Results revealed a stem-by-modality and a suffix-by-modality interaction, indicating that morphology plays a more prominent role in the visual than in the auditory domain. Moreover, a significant language-by-stem interaction indicated more robust morphological processing in German than in French. The latter result supports the idea that morphological processing is influenced by the morphological productivity of a language.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this article.
Notes
1. Suffix frequencies were extracted from CELEX (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, Citation1993) for German and Lexique (New et al., Citation2004) for French. We note however that the suffix frequency measures for the two languages are not directly comparable, because the size of the corresponding corpora and the morphological segmentation methods that were used in each case differed.
2. Due to an oversight, three German non-suffixed words (Bescheid, Existenz, Frisur) were originally incorrectly chosen as suffixed. However, for the calculation of the psycholinguistic properties of the items and the analyses, these items were classified as non-suffixed.
3. It is worth noting that just like suffix frequencies, stem frequencies in the two languages cannot be directly compared, because the size of the corresponding corpora are substantially different.
4. It is worth noting that in a recent cross-linguistic study that investigated morphological effects on reading aloud as a function of the orthographic consistency and morphological complexity of a language (Mousikou et al., Citation2020), we observed that it is the orthographic consistency of a language, rather than its morphological complexity, that influences morphological processing in reading aloud. However, the consistency with which letters in a certain language map onto phonemes is critical for reading aloud, which could explain why this particular language characteristic influenced morphological processing in this task over and above morphological complexity.