Sharing Morphemes Without Sharing Meaning: Production and Comprehension of German Verbs in the Context of Morphological Relatives.

We investigated the impact of derived German verbs on the production and recognition of morphologically related simple verbs. In order to disentangle effects of morphological, semantic, and phonological relatedness, target verbs were combined (e.g., zählen--to count) with four context verbs: Two morphologically related context verbs that were either semantically transparent (verzählen--to miscount) or semantically opaque (erzählen--to tell), a semantically related (rechnen--to calculate) and a phonologically related (zähmen--to tame) context verb. Morphologically related complex verbs reduced picture naming latencies as well as lexical decision latencies. Semantically related verbs did not show any reliable effects. In production, morphological facilitation was almost four times larger than phonological facilitation. In comprehension, pure form overlap produced inhibition. We argue that in German, production and comprehension processes operate on morphologically decomposed lexical form representations. Independent from semantic transparency, complex verbs are broken down into their morphemes during comprehension and are assembled during production.