Processing derived verbs: the role of motor-relatedness and type of morphological priming

Abstract

There is no consensus on whether derived words are decomposed or processed holistically, and on which factors this depends. Using overt visual priming with lexical decision involving Dutch derived particle verbs, we manipulated three factors: semantic transparency of the derived words, motorrelatedness of the simple verb constituent, and type of morphological priming. Experiments 1 and 2 (using simple verbs primed by their derivations or vice versa) showed overall facilitatory morphological priming effects, independent of transparency or motor-relatedness. In Experiment 3 (using priming between the derivation and a word semantically related to its stem), only transparent motor-related derivations were primed. The combined results suggest that the processing of derivations is influenced by priming type: constituent priming (Exp. 1 & 2) may induce a bias towards a decompositional processing strategy, possibly by directing attention to the stimuli's morphological structure. The role of motor-relatedness is discussed in the context of embodied cognition theory.

Modeling Morphological Priming in German With Naive Discriminative Learning

“…Experiments addressing speech production in Dutch (Roelofs, 1997a,b;Roelofs et al, 2002) likewise observed, using the implicit priming task, that priming effects were equivalent for transparent and opaque prime-target pairs. Morphological priming without effects of semantic transparency have recently been replicated in Dutch under overt prime presentations (Creemers et al, 2019;De Grauwe et al, 2019). Unprimed and primed visual lexical decision experiments on Dutch low-frequency suffixed words with high-frequency base words revealed that the semantics of opaque complex words were equally quickly available as the semantics of transparent complex words (Schreuder et al, 2003), contradicting the original prediction of this study that transparent words would show a processing advantage compared to their opaque counterparts.…”

Retrieving stem meanings in opaque words during auditory lexical processing

“…This relates further to a large body of semantic priming literature that shows that priming effects increase in magnitude as the relatedness proportion increases (for an overview see Hutchison, 2007). Second, we included semantic associates that are nouns, as was done in De Grauwe et al (2019), such that critical prime-target pairs consisted not only of verb-verb pairs but also of verbnoun pairs. Finally, as noted above, we presented primes and targets auditorily, which has been shown to result in larger effect sizes for semantic and associative priming compared to visually presented stimuli (Gomes et al, 1997;Hutchison, 2003).…”

“…umbringen "kill" → MORD "murder") also did not lead to significant priming effects in the shorter SOA experiment, while this condition did show significant priming in experiments with longer SOAs. Second, the designs in De Grauwe et al (2019) and Zwitserlood et al (2005) used between-target designs. The different priming patterns could thus, in principle, be due to differences between the individual targets in the different conditions.…”

“…In this vein, an active literature that employs morphological constituent priming experiments has consistently shown that Dutch and German prefixed verbs prime their stem in overt visual, cross-modal, and auditory paradigms, regardless of semantic transparency (Creemers et al, 2020;De Grauwe et al, 2019;Smolka et al, 2009Smolka et al, , 2014Smolka et al, , 2015Smolka et al, , 2019. In these studies, significant stem priming effects are found for semantically transparent (e.g.…”

“…Prefixed verbs in Dutch and German have proven a fertile testing ground for distinguishing among the different types of relatedness (Creemers et al, 2020;De Grauwe et al, 2019;Smolka et al, 2009Smolka et al, , 2014Smolka et al, , 2015Smolka et al, , 2019. The verbal systems of these languages contain a large number of verb stems that appear with a small set of prefixed elements.…”