Article in:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2020
Edited by Elena Tribushinina and Mark Dingemanse
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 37] 2020
► pp. 165–179

Morphological processing in nominalizations

A priming study on Dutch

| Universiteit van Amsterdam
| University of Pennsylvania
| Universiteit van Amsterdam

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.

Keywords: priming, stem allomorphy, nominalizations, morphological processing
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