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Article published In:
What is a verb? – Linguistic, psycholinguistic and developmental perspectives on verbs in Germanic and Semitic languages
Edited by Eva Smolka and Dorit Ravid
[The Mental Lexicon 14:2] 2019
► pp. 274–297

What do children know about German verb prefixes?

A study on the development of verb derivation from preschool age to school age

| University of Graz

Not much is known about how children cope with the task of acquiring the complex, polyfunctional, and often abstract and idiosyncratic system of German verbal prefixes. This paper presents an experimental study on children’s knowledge, i.e. their morphological and semantic awareness, of the five verbal prefixes be‑, ent‑, er‑, ver‑, and zer‑ in preschool age and early school age. The experiment combines a decision and a definition task involving canonical and novel prefix verbs, and it examines the influence of context on the recognition of the verbs.

The results of the study show that, in general, the knowledge of prefix verbs increases significantly between 6 and 8 years. Preschoolers have preliminary, but still very labile representations of the five verbal prefixes, school children have established much more independent representations, however, the lexical knowledge they have about prefixes and prefixed verbs is still fragmentary. The five prefixes under investigation differ considerably with respect to their morpho-semantic transparency. Higher transparency results in good passive knowledge of the prefixes, even when they are rarely used by the children spontaneously, such as the infrequent, but semantically salient prefix ent- (ent-kommen ‘escape’), that is much better known to children than spontaneous speech data would suggest.

Keywords: L1 development, morphology, verb derivation, prefixes, semantics, German
Article outline
  • The acquisition of derivation
    • The acquisition of verb derivation in German
    • Verb prefixes in German
    • German verb prefixes in development
  • The experimental study on verb prefixes
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Design
      • Test materials
      • Procedure
      • Categorization of the test items
      • Scoring of the lexical decision task
      • Scoring of the definition task
      • Statistical analyses
  • Results
    • Lexical decision task
      • Differences between age groups
      • Context condition
      • Differences between prefixes
    • Definition task
      • Canonical definitions
      • Transparency of the prefixes
    • The role of children’s sibling position
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 January 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00007.mat
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