Morphological processing in nominalizations
A priming study on Dutch
A major debate in psycholinguistics concerns the representation of morphological structure in the mental lexicon.
We report the results of an auditory primed lexical decision experiment in which we tested whether verbs prime their
nominalizations in Dutch. We find morphological priming effects with regular nominalizations (schorsen ‘suspend’
→ schorsing ‘suspension’) as well as with irregular nominalizations (schieten ‘shoot’ →
schot ‘shot’). On this basis, we claim that, despite the lack of phonological identity between stem and
derivation in the case of irregular nominalizations, the morphological relation between the two forms, suffices to evoke a priming
effect. However, an alternative explanation, according to which the semantic relation in combination with the phonological overlap
accounts for the priming effect, cannot be excluded.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Nominalization in Dutch
- 3.An auditory primed lexical decision experiment
- 3.1Methods
- 3.1.1Materials
- 3.1.2Apparatus
- 3.1.3Procedure
- 3.1.4Participants
- 3.2Results
- 3.2.1Analyses
- 3.2.2Results irregular nominalizations
- 3.2.3Results regular nominalizations
- 4.Discussion of the results
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
References