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.

Open-source software to conduct online rating studies.

Several software programs exist to assist researchers in setting up online questionnaires. Existing tools are of little help for delivering online rating studies, for which it is often desirable to collect data from participants for only a subset of a stimulus set. OR-Vis enables researchers to quickly set up online rating studies by supplying the set of items to be rated, the number of stimuli an individual participant responds to, the number of participants an item is shown to, and the rating questions. The software then generates and delivers unique questionnaires for each participant, while managing the data collection process. The present article describes OR-Vis, its installation process, and how to use it to gather data. OR-Vis is open-source software and can be downloaded from www.orvis.uni-muenster.de.