Abstract
AbstractIn two visual priming experiments, we investigated the relation of form-identical word forms with different grammatical functions in L1 and L2 German. Four different grammatical types (inflected verbs, infinitives, deverbal conversion forms, and countable nouns) were used as primes and their influence on the processing of form-identical inflected verbs as targets was compared. Results revealed full priming of inflected verbs, but only partial priming for conversion forms and infinitives. No priming was observed for semantically related countable nouns suggesting that they have a separate lexical entry. The findings bring first psycholinguistic evidence for typological claims that deverbal conversion nouns and infinitives fall into the category of nonfinites. They also support accounts assuming representations with a basic lexical entry and word-category specific subentries. The same priming pattern was observed in L1 and L2 suggesting that representation and processing of the studied complex forms is not fundamentally different in the two populations.
Highlights
Despite the fact that formal ambiguity is a frequent phenomenon in languages with limited inflection like English or German, little is known about relations between mentalThe authors thank to Fidan Firat, Hanna Marschner, and Raphael Münz for their help with running the experiments and collecting the data.Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
We explore overtly identical, but morphologically complex, forms that have either the same or modified lexical meaning
All statistical analyses comprise a factor Language referring to the two groups of participants, that is, whether they were native speakers of German (L1) or language learners (L2)
Summary
Despite the fact that formal ambiguity is a frequent phenomenon in languages with limited inflection like English or German, little is known about relations between mentalThe authors thank to Fidan Firat, Hanna Marschner, and Raphael Münz for their help with running the experiments and collecting the data. We explore overtly identical, but morphologically complex, forms that have either the same (inflected forms) or modified (deverbal conversion forms, countable nouns) lexical meaning. For this purpose, we employ an overt priming paradigm, in which both primes and targets appear in brief phrasal contexts about which participants make grammaticality decisions. A special section will be devoted to the phenomenon of conversion (zero-derivation), which was the primary target of our research for two reasons: Firstly, verb-noun conversion is a very productive process in German and all German verbs can be turned into deverbal nouns this way; secondly, despite the important role that verb-noun conversion plays in German, apart from one pilot study (Verma & Bordag, 2015), there is virtually no psycholinguistic research on the topic in German and very little on this and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. This is true both with respect to L1 and L2, which is a reason why we decided to perform the study both with native speakers of German and with advanced German learners at B2/C1 level
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