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Morphological priming in the German mental lexicon
I Sonnenstuhl1, S Eisenbeiss, H Clahsen
1Department of Linguistics, University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Cognition
|October 16, 1999
Summary
Regularly inflected German words show full priming effects in cross-modal experiments, while irregular word forms exhibit partial priming. This finding contrasts regular and irregular inflection processing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Inflectional morphology is crucial for word meaning and grammatical function.
- Understanding how the brain processes regular versus irregular word forms is key to modeling language acquisition and processing.
- Cross-modal priming offers insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying word recognition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate priming effects in German participles and noun plurals.
- To compare the processing of regularly and irregularly inflected word forms.
- To evaluate theoretical models of inflectional morphology.
Main Methods:
- Cross-modal priming experiments were conducted using German participles and noun plurals.
- Participants performed lexical decision tasks on visually presented word forms after auditory primes.
- Reaction times were measured and compared across different conditions (regular vs. irregular, priming vs. control).
Main Results:
- Regularly inflected German words (-t participles, -s plurals) showed full priming, with reaction times similar to identical prime-target pairs.
- Irregularly inflected German words (-n participles, -er plurals) exhibited partial priming, resulting in longer reaction times compared to identical prime-target pairs.
- Clear priming differences were observed between regular and irregular inflectional systems in German.
Conclusions:
- German regularly inflected words are processed differently from irregularly inflected words.
- Findings support the comparison with English and Italian inflectional systems.
- Results have implications for single versus dual-mechanism models of inflectional processing.
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