'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 pre- ceded by derivations that were semantically related (zubinden, ‘tie’) or semantically unre- lated (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 audi- tory (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 deriva- tions was equivalent to that from transparent derivations. These findings indicate that the lexical representation of complex verbs refers to the base regardless of meaning compos- itionality. Lexical representations in German thus differ from those in other Indo-European languages. This new evidence points to the necessity to encompass cross-linguistic varia- tions in the modeling of lexical representation.