The role of motor-relatedness and priming type in the processing of Dutch derived verbs
Sophie De Grauwe1, Kristin Lemhöfer1, Herbert Schriefers1
1Radboud
University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour,
Nijmegen, The Netherlands
s.degrauwe@donders.ru.nl
To find out whether morphologically complex derived words are decomposed or processed
holistically, many studies use either morphological priming (priming between a complex word
and its stem) or ‘semantic-morphological’ priming (priming between a complex word and a word
semantically related to its stem). We used both types of priming with the same stimuli to find out
whether type of priming influences results. In addition, we tested whether verbs of the more
‘concrete’ type, namely motor verbs, are processed differently from non-motor-related verbs. In
two visual priming experiments, participants made lexical decisions to Dutch derived particle
verbs. Half of these verbs contained a stem with a motor-related meaning, the other half did not.
In each condition, half of the verbs were semantically transparent (i.e. semantically related to
their stems, e.g., afkoelen ‘cool down’), the other half were opaque (e.g., omspringen ‘deal
with’). In Experiment 1, results showed an overall morphological priming effect: particle verbs
preceded by their stem were responded to more quickly than those preceded by an unrelated
prime, independent of Transparency or Motor-relatedness. With semantic-morphological
priming (Experiment 2), however, only transparent motor-related particle verbs were primed by
words semantically related to their stem. The results suggest that the morphological priming
method may overestimate the degree of morphological decomposition, possibly due to methodspecific processing strategies, and that robust evidence for morphological decomposition of
verbs exists in particular for transparent and highly concrete, i.e. motor-related verbs. This
finding will be discussed in the context of embodied cognition theory.
Keywords: priming, morphology, embodied cognition