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Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 12:3 (2017) ► pp.342–372

Accessing morphosyntactic information is preserved at old age, except for irregulars

| Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
| Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism

The current study examined morphological priming in older individuals using two complex phenomena of German inflection. Study 1 examined inflected adjectives which encode multiple morphosyntactic features using regular affixes. Study 2 targeted inflected verb forms which also encode multiple features, but in this case using idiosyncratic stem variants. Study 1 revealed priming effects indicating efficient access of morphosyntactic features from inflected word forms with regular affixes. Study 2 showed that the same individuals were less efficient at accessing morphosyntactic features from marked stems. We argue that this contrast reflects age-related memory decline, which affects feature access from (lexically conditioned) stem variants more than feature access from lexically unconditioned regular forms.

Keywords: morphological processing, morphosyntactic features, affixation, allomorphy, memory
Article outline
  • Study 1: Adjective inflection in older Germans
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Procedure
      • Data analysis and model selection
    • Results
      • Additional analyses
    • Discussion
  • Study 2: Inflected verbs with marked stems in older Germans
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Procedure and data analysis
    • Results
      • Additional analyses
    • Discussion
  • General discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 16 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.17008.rei
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