Cover not available
Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon
Vol. 12:3 (2017) ► pp.342–372

Accessing morphosyntactic information is preserved at old age, except for irregulars

 | Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
 | Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
The current study examined morphological priming in older individuals using two complex phenomena of German inflection. Study 1 examined inflected adjectives which encode multiple morphosyntactic features using regular affixes. Study 2 targeted inflected verb forms which also encode multiple features, but in this case using idiosyncratic stem variants. Study 1 revealed priming effects indicating efficient access of morphosyntactic features from inflected word forms with regular affixes. Study 2 showed that the same individuals were less efficient at accessing morphosyntactic features from marked stems. We argue that this contrast reflects age-related memory decline, which affects feature access from (lexically conditioned) stem variants more than feature access from lexically unconditioned regular forms.
Keywords: morphological processing, morphosyntactic features, affixation, allomorphy, memory
Article outline
  • Study 1: Adjective inflection in older Germans
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Procedure
      • Data analysis and model selection
    • Results
      • Additional analyses
    • Discussion
  • Study 2: Inflected verbs with marked stems in older Germans
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials
      • Procedure and data analysis
    • Results
      • Additional analyses
    • Discussion
  • General discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 16 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.17008.rei
References (89)
References
Allen, P. A., Madden, D. J., & Crozier, L. C. (1991). Adult age differences in letter-level and word-level processing. Psychology and Aging, 61, 261–271. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, S. R. (1992). A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, M. (1994). Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1971). The Control of Short-Term Memory. Scientific American, 2241, 82–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2013). languageR: Data sets and functions with “Analyzing Linguistic Data: A practical introduction to statistics”. R package version 1.4.1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., & Gulikers, L. (1995). The CELEX lexical database. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., & Milin, P. (2010). Analyzing reaction times. International Journal of Psychological Research, 31, 12–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barbour, J. S. (1982). Productive and non-productive morphology: The case of the German strong verbs. Journal of Linguistics, 181, 331–354. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 681, 255–278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Basnight-Brown, D. M., Chen, L., Hua, S., Kostić, A., & Feldman, L. B. (2007). Monolingual and Bilingual Recognition of Regular and Irregular English Verbs: Sensitivity to Form Similarity Varies with First Language Experience. Journal of Memory and Language, 571, 65–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2014). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1–7. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beedham, C. (1994). The role of consonants in marking strong verb conjugation in German and English. Folia linguistica, 281, 279–296. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berres, M., Monsch, A. U., Bernasconi, F., Thalmann, B., & Stähelin, H. B. (2000). Normal ranges of neuropsychological tests for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 771, 195–199.Google Scholar
Bierwisch, M. (1967). Syntactic features in morphology: General problems of so-called pronominal inflection in German. In To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, October 11, 1966. (Bd. I1, pp. 239–270). The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Birdsong, D., & Flege, J. E. (2001). Regular-Irregular Dissociations in L2 Acquisition of English Morphology. In BUCLD 25: Proceedings of the 25th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 123–132). Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Birdsong, D. (2004). Second Language Acquisition and Ultimate Attainment. In A. Davies & C. Elder (Eds.), The Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 82–105). London: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2005). Interpreting age effects in second language acquisition. In J. Kroll & A. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches (pp. 109–127). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bittner, A. (1996). Starke “schwache” Verben–schwache “starke” Verben. Struktur des deutschen Verbsystems. Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar
Blevins, J. P. (1995). Syncretism and paradigmatic opposition. Linguistics and Philosophy, 181, 113–152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borod, J. C., Goodglass, H., & Kaplan, E. (1980). Normative Data on the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, Parietal Lobe Battery, and the Boston Naming Test. Journal of Clinical Neuropsychology, 231, 209–215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bosch, S., & Clahsen, H. (2016). Accessing Morphosyntax in L1 and L2 Word Recognition: A Priming Study of Inflected German Adjectives. The Mental Lexicon, 111, 26–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowles, N. L., & Poon, L. W. (1981). The effect of age on speed of lexical access. Experimental Aging Research, 71, 417–425. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burke, D. M., & MacKay, D. G. (1997). Memory, language, and ageing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 3521, 1845–1856. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burke, D. M., & Shafto, M. A. (2004). Aging and language production. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 131, 21–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chandler, M. J., Lacritz, L. H., Hynan, L. S., Barnard, H. D., Allen, G., Deschner, M., … Cullum, C. M. (2005). A total score for the CERAD neuropsychological battery. Neurology, 651, 102–106. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cheong, A. M., Legge, G. E., Lawrence, M. G., Cheung, S. H., & Ruff, M. A. (2008). Relationship between visual span and reading performance in age-related macular degeneration. Vision Research, 481, 577–588. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: a multidisciplinary study of German inflection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 221, 991–1060. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiss, S., Hadler, M., & Sonnenstuhl, I. (2001). The mental representation of inflected words: An experimental study of adjectives and verbs in German. Language, 771, 510–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clahsen, H., Prüfert, P., Eisenbeiss, S., & Cholin, J. (2002). Strong stems in the German mental lexicon: Evidence from child language acquisition and adult processing. In I. Kaufmann & B. Stiebels (Eds.), More than words: A Festschrift for Dieter Wunderlich (pp. 91–112). Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.Google Scholar
Clahsen, H., & Reifegerste, J. (2017). Morphological processing in old-age bilinguals. In M. Libben, M. Goral, & G. Libben (Eds.), Bilingualism: A Framework for Understanding the Mental Lexicon. (pp. 217–248). Amsterdam: Benjamins
Cortese, M. J., Balota, D. A., Sergent-Marshall, S. D., Buckner, R. L., & Gold, B. T. (2006). Consistency and regularity in past-tense verb generation in healthy ageing, Alzheimer’s disease, and semantic dementia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 231, 856–876. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Curcio, C. A., Owsley, C., & Jackson, G. R. (2000). Spare the rods, save the cones in aging and age-related maculopathy. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 411, 2015–2018.Google Scholar
Davis, C. J. (2000). Match calculator. Software. Retrieved from [URL]
Davis, S. W., Zhuang, J., Wright, P., & Tyler, L. K. (2014). Age-related sensitivity to task-related modulation of language-processing networks. Neuropsychologia, 631, 107–115. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dobbs, A. R., & Rule, B. G. (1989). Adult age differences in working memory. Psychology and Aging, 41, 500–503. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duñabeitia, J. A., Marin, A., Avilés, A., Perea, M., & Carreiras, M. (2009). Constituent priming effects: Evidence for preserved morphological processing in healthy old readers. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 211, 283–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Durrell, M. (1980). Morphophonologische und morpholexische Regelmäßigkeiten im deutschen Ablautsystem. Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik, 81, 19–28.Google Scholar
(2001). Strong verb ablaut in the West Germanic languages. In S. Watts, J. West, & H. Solms (Eds.), Zur Verbmorphologie germanischer Sprachen (pp. 5–18). Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feldman, L. B., & Larabee, J. (2001). Morphological facilitation following prefixed but not suffixed primes: lexical architecture or modality-specific processes? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 271, 680–691.Google Scholar
Fleischman, D. A. (2007). Repetition priming in aging and Alzheimer’s disease: an integrative review and future directions. Cortex, 431, 889–897. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Folstein, M. F., Folstein, S. E., & McHugh, P. R. (1975). “Mini-mental state”: a practical method for grading the cognitive state of patients for the clinician. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 121, 189–198. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Foos, P. W. (1989). Adult age differences in working memory. Psychology and Aging, 41, 269–275. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forster, K. I., & Davis, C. (1984). Repetition priming and frequency attenuation in lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 101, 680–698.Google Scholar
Forster, K. I., & Forster, J. C. (2003). DMDX: A windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 351, 116–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Günther, H. (1988). Oblique word forms in visual word recognition. Linguistics, 261, 583–600. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (1988). Working memory, comprehension, and aging: A review and a new view. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 221, pp. 193–225). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hippisley, A. (2016). Network Morphology. In A. Hippisley & G. Stump (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology (pp. 816–851). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Isaacs, B., & Kennie, A. T. (1973). The Set test as an aid to the detection of dementia in old people. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 1231, 467–470. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kavé, G., & Levy, Y. (2005). The Processing of Morphology in Old Age: Evidence From Hebrew. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 481, 1442–1451. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kemtes, K. A., & Kemper, S. (1997). Younger and older adults’ on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences. Psychology and Aging, 121, 362–371. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiparsky, P. (1998). Paradigm effects and opacity. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Köpcke, K. -M. (1998). Prototypisch starke und schwache Verben der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Germanistische Linguistik, 141/1421, 45–60.Google Scholar
Krause, H., Bosch, S., & Clahsen, H. (2015). Morphosyntax in the bilingual mental lexicon. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 371, 597–621. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kynette, D., & Kemper, S. (1986). Aging and the loss of grammatical forms: A cross-sectional study of language performance. Language & Communication, 61, 65–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leminen, A., & Clahsen, H. (2014). Brain potentials to inflected adjectives: beyond storage and decomposition. Brain Research, 15431, 223–234. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Light, L. L., & Capps, J. L. (1986). Comprehension of pronouns in young and older adults. Developmental Psychology, 221, 580–585. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lukatela, G., Carello, C., & Turvey, M. (1987). Lexical representation of regular and irregular inflected nouns. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21, 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lustig, C., Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (2007). Inhibitory deficit theory: Recent developments in a “new view”. Inhibition in Cognition, 171, 145–162. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacKay, D. G., & Burke, D. M. (1990). Cognition and aging: a theory of new learning and the use of old connections. In T. M. Hess (Ed.), Aging and Cognition: Knowledge, Organization, and Utilization (pp. 213–263). Amsterdam: North-Holland. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mortensen, L., Meyer, A. S., & Humphreys, G. W. (2006). Age-related effects on speech production: A review. Language and Cognitive Processes, 211, 238–290. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moscoso del Prado Martín, F. (2017). Vocabulary, Grammar, Sex, and Aging. Cognitive Science, 411, 950–975. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Newman, R. S., & German, D. J. (2005). Life span effects of lexical factors on oral naming. Language and Speech, 481, 123–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Opitz, A., Regel, S., Müller, G., & Friederici, A. D. (2013). Neurophysiological evidence for morphological underspecification in German strong adjective inflection. Language, 891, 231–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Park, D. C., Lautenschlager, G., Hedden, T., Davidson, N., Smith, A. D., & Smith, P. (2002). Models of visuospatial and verbal memory across the adult life span. Psychology and Aging, 161, 299–320. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paster, M. (2016). Alternations: Stems and Allomorphy. In A. Hippisley & G. Stump (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology (pp. 174–214). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Penke, M., Janssen, U., & Eisenbeiss, S. (2004). Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features. Brain and Language, 901, 423–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prasada, S., & Pinker, S. (1993). Generalisation of regular and irregular morphological patterns. Language and Cognitive Processes, 81, 1–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramscar, M., Hendrix, P., Shaoul, C., Milin, P., & Baayen, R. H. (2014). The myth of cognitive decline: Non-linear dynamics of lifelong learning. Topics in Cognitive Science, 61, 5–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reifegerste, J., Hauer, F., & Felser, C. (2017). Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging: Evidence from subject-verb agreement in German. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 241, 672–702. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Riley, J. C. (2005). Estimates of Regional and Global Life Expectancy. Population and Development Review, 311, 537–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosen, W. G., Mohs, K. L., & Davis, R. C. (1984). A New Rating Scale for Alzheimer’s Disease. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 1411, 1356–1364. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salthouse, T. A. (1994). The aging of working memory. Neuropsychology, 81, 535–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schriefers, H., Friederici, A., & Graetz, P. (1992). Inflectional and derivational morphology in the mental lexicon: Symmetries and asymmetries in repetition priming. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 441, 373–390. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Singer, T., Verhaeghen, P., Ghisletta, P., Lindenberger, U., & Baltes, P. B. (2003). The fate of cognition in very old age: six-year longitudinal findings in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE). Psychology and Aging, 181, 318–331. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Smolka, E., Zwitserlood, P., & Rösler, F. (2007). Stem access in regular and irregular inflection: Evidence from German participles. Journal of Memory and Language, 571, 325–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spear, P. D. (1993). Neural bases of visual deficits during aging. Vision Research, 331, 2589–2609. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Treitz, F. H., Heyder, K., & Daum, I. (2007). Differential course of executive control changes during normal aging. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 141, 370–393. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tyler, L. K., Shafto, M. A., Randall, B., Wright, P., Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Stamatakis, E. A. (2010). Preserving syntactic processing across the adult life span: The modulation of the frontotemporal language system in the context of age-related atrophy. Cerebral Cortex, 201, 352–364. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ullman, M. T., Corkin, S., Coppola, M., Hickok, G., Growdon, J. H., Koroshetz, W. J., & Pinker, S. (1997). A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 91, 266–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhaeghen, P. (2011). Aging and executive control: reports of a demise greatly exaggerated. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 201, 174–180. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhaeghen, P., & Cerella, J. (2002). Aging, executive control, and attention: A review of meta-analyses. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 261, 849–857. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhaeghen, P., Marcoen, A., & Goossens, L. (1993). Facts and fiction about memory aging: A quantitative integration of research findings. Journal of Gerontology, 481, P157–P171. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhaeghen, P., & Salthouse, T. A. (1997). Meta-analyses of age–cognition relations in adulthood: estimates of linear and nonlinear age effects and structural models. Psychological Bulletin, 1221, 231–249. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wecker, N. S., Kramer, J. H., Wisniewski, A., Delis, D. C., & Kaplan, E. (2000). Age effects on executive ability. Neuropsychology, 141, 409–414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wiese, B. (1996). Iconicity and syncretism: On pronominal inflection in Modern German. In R. Sackmann (Ed.), Theoretical Linguistics and Grammatical Description (pp. 323–344). Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1999). Unterspezifizierte Paradigmen: Form und Funktion in der pronominalen Deklination. Linguistik Online, 4(3). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2008). Form and function of verbal ablaut in contemporary standard German. In R. Sackmann (Ed.), Explorations in Integrational Linguistics. Four essays on German, French, and Guaraní (pp. 97–151). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wingfield, A., Stine, E. A., Lahar, C. J., & Aberdeen, J. S. (1988). Does the capacity of working memory change with age?. Experimental Aging Research, 141, 103–107. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wunderlich, D. (1996). Minimalist morphology: The role of paradigms. In G. Booji & J. van Marle (Eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1995 (pp. 93–114). Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Reifegerste, Jana
2024. Morphological processing across the adult lifespan: a tale of gains and losses. Journal of Language and Aging Research 2:1 ► pp. 85 ff. DOI logo
Savinova, Elena & Svetlana Malyutina
2021. Evidence for dual-route morphological processing across the lifespan: data from Russian noun plurals. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 36:6 ► pp. 730 ff. DOI logo
Royle, Phaedra, Karsten Steinhauer, Émie Dessureault, Alexandre C. Herbay & Simona M. Brambati
2019. Aging and Language: Maintenance of Morphological Representations in Older Adults. Frontiers in Communication 4 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.