Morphological processing in nominalizations

Van Lipzig, E. v., Creemers, A., & Don, J. (2020). Morphological processing in nominalizations. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 37, 165-179. doi:10.1075/avt.00044.lip.
A major debate in psycholinguistics concerns the representation of morphological structure in the mental lexicon. We report the results of an auditory primed lexical decision experiment in which we tested whether verbs prime their nominalizations in Dutch. We find morphological priming effects with regular nominalizations (schorsen ‘suspend’ → schorsing ‘suspension’) as well as with irregular nominalizations (schieten ‘shoot’ → schot ‘shot’). On this basis, we claim that, despite the lack of phonological identity between stem and derivation in the case of irregular nominalizations, the morphological relation between the two forms, suffices to evoke a priming effect. However, an alternative explanation, according to which the semantic relation in combination with the phonological overlap accounts for the priming effect, cannot be excluded
Publication type
Journal article
Publication date
2020

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