German English Comparison

What is it about?

In morphological processing, research has repeatedly found different priming effects by English and German native speakers in the overt priming paradigm. In English, priming effects were found for word pairs with a morphological and semantic relation (SUCCESSFUL-success), but not for pairs without a semantic relation (SUCCESSOR-success). By contrast, morphological priming effects in German occurred for pairs both with a semantic relation (AUFSTEHEN-stehen, ‘stand up’-‘stand’) and without (VERSTEHEN-stehen, ‘understand’-‘stand’). These behavioural differences have been taken to indicate differential language processing and memory representations in these languages. The present results indicate that the investigated cross-linguistic effect can be attributed to quantitatively-characterized differences in the speakers' language experience, as approximated by linguistic corpora.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

In a considerable body of studies it has been shown that humans are powerful learners of statistical patterns and covariation in their environment. We interpret our present results to be in line with these observations, suggesting that statistical learning can be considered as an important mechanism involved also in the learning of higher-level language phenomena, such as morphology and lexical semantics. This view can account for cross-linguistic patterns in behavioural data that are otherwise difficult to explain.