A chatterbox is a box: Morphology in German word production

Abstract

Two experiments are reported in which university students translated visually presented English words into German, while German distractor words were simultaneously presented. Distractors were morphologically related, merely form-related or unrelated to the German translations (target words). The transparency of the semantic relation between target words and morphological distractors was also varied. Morphological distractors facilitated word-translation latencies irrespective of their semantic transparency, replicating results obtained with other tasks. Thus, in German word production, effects of morphological complexity seem to be largely independent of semantics. Morphological facilitation is also not due to mere form relatedness, since phonological distractors had no impact on translation latencies, relative to unrelated distractors. Our data corroborate the usefulness of word-translation for investigating spoken word production, in particular, for morphological processing.