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'Understanding' differs between English and German: Capturing systematic language differences of complex words.

Fritz Günther¹, Eva Smolka², Marco Marelli³

¹University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.

Cortex; a Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior

|October 24, 2018

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German and English speakers show different responses in word processing tasks. Computational analysis suggests language structure, specifically German

Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Computational Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

English and German native speakers exhibit distinct priming effects in morphological processing.
These behavioral differences suggest variations in language processing and memory representations between English and German.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if differences in language structure explain observed cross-linguistic priming effects.
To quantify the semantic predictability within the morphological systems of English and German.

Main Methods:

Utilized distributional semantics to derive observed and compositional representations of complex word meanings.
Quantified semantic predictability by comparing similarities between transparent/opaque words and their stems.
Analyzed linguistic corpora to approximate speakers' language experience.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

German exhibits higher morphological systematicity compared to English.
Computational methods revealed quantitative differences in semantic predictability between the two languages.
The degree of semantic predictability correlates with observed priming effects.

Conclusions:

Cross-linguistic differences in morphological priming effects can be attributed to language structure and speaker experience.
Distributional semantics provides a robust method for analyzing morphological systematicity.
Language experience, as reflected in corpora, plays a significant role in shaping psycholinguistic processing.