‘Verstehen’ (‘understand’) primes ‘stehen’ (‘stand’): Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs

Abstract

The lexical representation of words in Indo-European languages is generally assumed to be driven by meaning compositionality. This study examined the lexical representation of complex verbs in German, which is a morphologically rich representative of Indo-European languages. Three overt priming experiments manipulated prime–target relations between morphological, semantic, and form relatedness. Base verbs (e.g., binden, ‘bind’) were preceded by derivations that were semantically related (zubinden, ‘tie’) or semantically unrelated (entbinden, ‘deliver’), by purely semantically related (zuschnüren, ‘tie’), form-related (abbilden, ‘depict’), or unrelated (abholzen, ‘deforest’) verbs. To ensure that the procedures were sensitive to semantic and form processing, semantic associates (Messer–Gabel, ‘knife–fork’) and form controls (Bordell–Bord, ‘brothel–board’; beschreiben–reiben, ‘describe–rub’) were added in Experiment 3. To examine whether lexical representation is affected by modality, prime presentation was further varied between visual (Exp. 1 and 3) and auditory (Exp. 2). Semantic facilitation (Exp. 3) and form inhibition (Exp. 2 and 3) were not reliable across experiments, while morphological facilitation was strong and unaffected by semantic relatedness in all three experiments. That is, the priming from semantically opaque derivations was equivalent to that from transparent derivations. These findings indicate that the lexical representation of complex verbs refers to the base regardless of meaning compositionality. Lexical representations in German thus differ from those in other Indo-European languages. This new evidence points to the necessity to encompass cross-linguistic variations in the modeling of lexical representation.