‘Verstehen’ (‘understand’) primes ‘stehen’ (‘stand’): Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs

The lexical representation of words in Indo European languages is generally assumed to be driven by meaning compositionality. This study examined the lexical representation of complex verbs in German, which is a morphologically rich representative of Indo European languages. Three overt priming experiments manipulated prime target relations between morphological, semantic, and form relatedness. Base verbs (e.g., binden, ‘bind’) were pre ceded by derivations that were semantically related (zubinden, ‘tie’) or semantically unre lated (entbinden, ‘deliver’), by purely semantically related (zuschnüren, ‘tie’), form related (abbilden, ‘depict’), or unrelated (abholzen, ‘deforest’) verbs. To ensure that the procedures were sensitive to semantic and form processing, semantic associates (Messer Gabel, ‘knife fork’) and form controls (Bordell Bord, ‘brothel board’; beschreiben reiben, ‘describe rub’) were added in Experiment 3. To examine whether lexical representation is affected by modality, prime presentation was further varied between visual (Exp. 1 and 3) and audi