Het Verwerken Van Werkwoordsvormen

Abstract

In the comprehension of spoken language verbs play a very important part. Hence it is imperative for research on listening comprehension in a foreign language to find out what problems the FL student has with the processing of verb forms. Since a research instrument was not yet available an experiment was carried out with processing verb forms in the mother tongue. The most important questions were: are stem and affix processed independently, are there any differences with different types of verbs (strong or weak), and is the processing linear or holistic. Subjects were given pairs of verb forms and then had to decide whether stem and verb tense were the same by pressing a button which stopped an R T counter. The analysis of the results seem to show that stem decision is faster than tense decision, that type of verb (strong and weak) only'has an effect in tense decisions and that there are no clear arguments to be found either for linear or for holistic processing. These analyses are based on two reaction time measurements, one from the onset of the second verb form, the second from the end. Neither measurement seems to be satisfactory. The results will have to be submitted to a reinterpretation in which allowance is made in the reaction time measurement for the place in the word where the critical information lies (e.g. in "gespeeld" tense information lies in the beginning, in "speelde" at the end). Moreover, it is possible that the subjects in the experiment occupy themselves with two processes, word recognition followed by an analysis. We hope that reinterpretation will give a clear picture of the processing of verb forms and that it may form a basis for research in foreign language processing.