Morphological Processing across Modalities and Languages

Elisabeth Beyersmann (1) , Petroula Mousikou (2) , Ludivine Javourey-Drevet (3) , Sascha Schroeder (2) , Johannes Ziegler (4) , Jonathan Grainger (4)

1 Macquarie University
2 Max Planck Institute for Human Development
3 ADEF - Apprentissage, Didactique, Evaluation, Formation
4 LPC - Laboratoire de psychologie cognitive

The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing in the visual and auditory modality. French and German adults performed a visual and auditory lexical decision task that involved the same translation-equivalent items. The focus of the study was on nonwords, which were constructed in a way that the independent role of stems and suffixes in visual and auditory processing could be investigated. Results revealed a stem-by-modality and a suffix-by-modality interaction, indicating a more prominent role for morphology in the visual than in the auditory domain. Moreover, a significant language-by-stem interaction indicated more robust morphological processing in German than in French. The latter result supports the idea that morphological processing is influenced by the morphological productivity of a language.

Keywords: morphological processing; cross-linguistic; visual lexical decision; auditory lexical decision

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Education; Cognitive science; Psychology

Elisabeth Beyersmann, Petroula Mousikou, Ludivine Javourey-Drevet, Sascha Schroeder, Johannes Ziegler, et al.. Morphological Processing across Modalities and Languages. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2020, 24 (6), pp.500-519. ⟨10.1080/10888438.2020.1730847⟩. ⟨hal-02991231⟩