@phdthesis{Elin2018,
  author    = {Elin, Kirill},
  title     = {Morphological processing in older adults},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-418605},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {217},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {Over the last decades mechanisms of recognition of morphologically complex words have been extensively examined in order to determine whether all word forms are stored and retrieved from the mental lexicon as wholes or whether they are decomposed into their morphological constituents such as stems and affixes. Most of the research in this domain focusses on English. Several factors have been argued to affect morphological processing including, for instance, morphological structure of a word (e.g., existence of allomorphic stem alternations) and its linguistic nature (e.g., whether it is a derived word or an inflected word form). It is not clear, however, whether processing accounts based on experimental evidence from English would hold for other languages. Furthermore, there is evidence that processing mechanisms may differ across various populations including children, adult native speakers and language learners. Recent studies claim that processing mechanisms could also differ between older and younger adults (Clahsen \& Reifegerste, 2017; Reifegerste, Meyer, \& Zwitserlood, 2017). The present thesis examined how properties of the morphological structure, types of linguistic operations involved (i.e., the linguistic contrast between inflection and derivation) and characteristics of the particular population such as older adults (e.g., potential effects of ageing as a result of the cognitive decline or greater experience and exposure of older adults) affect initial, supposedly automatic stages of morphological processing in Russian and German. To this end, a series of masked priming experiments was conducted. In experiments on Russian, the processing of derived -ost' nouns (e.g., glupost' 'stupidity') and of inflected forms with and without allomorphic stem alternations in 1P.Sg.Pr. (e.g., igraju - igrat' 'to play' vs. košu - kosit' 'to mow') was examined. The first experiment on German examined and directly compared processing of derived -ung nouns (e.g., Gr{\"u}ndung 'foundation') and inflected -t past participles (e.g., gegr{\"u}ndet 'founded'), whereas the second one investigated the processing of regular and irregular plural forms (-s forms such as Autos 'cars' and -er forms such as Kinder 'children', respectively). The experiments on both languages have shown robust and comparable facilitation effects for derived words and regularly inflected forms without stem changes (-t participles in German, forms of -aj verbs in Russian). Observed morphological priming effects could be clearly distinguished from purely semantic or orthographic relatedness between words. At the same time, we found a contrast between forms with and without allomorphic stem alternations in Russian and regular and irregular forms in German, with significantly more priming for unmarked stems (relative to alternated ones) and significantly more priming for regular (compared) word forms. These findings indicate the relevance of morphological properties of a word for initial stages of processing, contrary to claims made in the literature holding that priming effects are determined by surface form and meaning overlap only. Instead, our findings are more consistent with approaches positing a contrast between combinatorial, rule-based and lexically-stored forms (Clahsen, Sonnenstuhl, \& Blevins, 2003). The doctoral dissertation also addressed the role of ageing and age-related cognitive changes on morphological processing. The results obtained on this research issue are twofold. On the one hand, the data demonstrate effects of ageing on general measures of language performance, i.e., overall longer reaction times and/or higher accuracy rates in older than younger individuals. These findings replicate results from previous studies, which have been linked to the general slowing of processing speed at older age and to the larger vocabularies of older adults. One the other hand, we found that more specific aspects of language processing appear to be largely intact in older adults as revealed by largely similar morphological priming effects for older and younger adults. These latter results indicate that initial stages of morphological processing investigated here by means of the masked priming paradigm persist in older age. One caveat should, however, be noted. Achieving the same performance as a younger individual in a behavioral task may not necessarily mean that the same neural processes are involved. Older people may have to recruit a wider brain network than younger individuals, for example. To address this and related possibilities, future studies should examine older people's neural representations and mechanisms involved in morphological processing.},
  language  = {en}
}