Stem access in regular and irregular inflection: Evidence from German participles

Smolka E, Zwitserlood P, Rösler F

Forschungsartikel (Zeitschrift) | Peer reviewed

Zusammenfassung

This study investigated whether German participles are retrieved as whole words from lexical storage or whether they are accessed via their morphemic constituents. German participle formation is of particular interest, since it is concatenative for both regular and irregular verbs and results from combinations of regular/irregular stems with regular/irregular suffixes. Data from visual priming showed that regular and irregular participles facilitated their base verbs to the same degree, which argues against different processing systems. Furthermore, "illegal combinations" of participle affixes and verbal or nonverbal stems (geworft, gewurft) were as effective as correct participles (geworfen) in facilitating the morphologically related base verb (werfen). This indicates that stems contained in illegal combinations were accessed, regardless of whether they originated from regular or irregular verbs. These findings strongly argue for a single system that processes both regular and irregular inflection via access to morphemic constituents. Such a single processing model is suggested. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Details zur Publikation

FachzeitschriftJournal of Memory and Language
Jahrgang / Bandnr. / Volume57
Ausgabe / Heftnr. / Issue3
Seitenbereich325-347
StatusVeröffentlicht
Veröffentlichungsjahr2007 (31.10.2007)
Sprache, in der die Publikation verfasst istEnglisch
DOI10.1016/j.jml.2007.04.005
Stichwörterinflectional morphology regularity participle priming illegal combinations morphological decomposition lexical retrieval single system stem access lexical access mental lexicon morphological representation word-frequency prefixed words recognition decomposition activation similarity retrieval

Autor*innen der Universität Münster

Zwitserlood, Pienie
Professur für Psycholinguistik und kognitive Neurowissenschaft (Prof. Zwitserlood)