Morphological priming in child German

Abstract

Regular and irregular inflection in children's production has been examined in many previous studies. Yet, little is known about the processes involved in children's recognition of inflected words. To gain insight into how children process inflected words, the current study examines regular -t and irregular -n participles of German using the cross-modal priming technique testing 108 monolingual German-speaking children in two age groups (group I, mean age: 8;4, group II, mean age: 9;9) and a control group of 72 adults. Although both age groups of children had the same full priming effect as adults for -t forms, only children of age group II showed an adult-like (partial) priming effect for -n participles. We argue that children (within the age range tested) employ the same mechanisms for regular inflection as adults but that the lexical retrieval processes required for irregular forms become more efficient when children get older.

Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: evidence from Arabic

“…This is a disadvantage when one of the goals of the experiment is to test for a potential phonological basis to word pattern priming. Thirdly, the use of cross-modal priming maintains continuity with previous work on languages like English, Italian, and German that has used the same task (e.g., Clahsen & Fleischhauer, 2014 ; Marslen-Wilson et al, 1994 ; Orsolini & Marslen-Wilson, 1997 ; Sonnenstuhl, Eisenbeiss, & Clahsen, 1999 ).…”

The development of morphological representations in young readers: a cross‐modal priming study

“…In addition, we manipulated grade level to track the developmental trajectory of morphological processing across grades 3 and 5 when children are learning a great deal about derivational forms (Anglin, 1993;Nagy, Winsor, Osborn, & O'Flahavan, 1994). This age range is also at the lower end of existing data on use of this method with children (e.g., Clahsen & Fleischhauer, 2014).…”

“…Most of the priming studies conducted in children used visual primes and targets. To our knowledge, only one study indicated that morphological priming is not specific to the visual modality in children: Clahsen and Fleischhauer () showed that 8‐ and 9‐year‐old German‐speaking children benefit from auditory primes to process visual targets that are morphologically related (e.g., gedruckt ‐ drucke ). Our study reinforces this result and extends it to the processing of derivational morphology: The presentation of a morphologically complex auditory prime facilitates subsequent root processing in third and fifth graders, indicating that the processing of morphological information is “modality‐independent”.…”

“…We chose this task to stay as close as possible to Gonnerman et al's procedure, who used a cross-modal priming design with spoken primes and visual targets. The appropriateness of this procedure for children was recently demonstrated by Clahsen and Fleischhauer (2014); they showed significant cross-modal morphological priming effects in German-speaking children between the ages of 7 and 10.…”

“…These priming effects have generally been interpreted as reflecting the activation of a morphological level of representation in children (Beyersmann et al., ; Clahsen & Fleischhauer, ; Quémart et al., ). But to date, stimulus types have not been manipulated in research with children in a manner that can differentiate the role of distinct morphological relationships from that of form and meaning overlap.…”