Morphonotactic and phonotactic processing in German-speaking adults Katharina Korecky-Kröll a, * , Wolfgang U. Dressler a, b , Eva Maria Freiberger a , Eva Reinisch c , Karlheinz Mörth b , Gary Libben d a University of Vienna, Austria b Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria c Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany d Brock University, Canada article info Article history: Available online 8 July 2014 Keywords: Morphonotactics Morphology Phonotactics Consonant clusters German Adult processing abstract Based on the theoretical framework of Dressler and Dziubalska-Kolaczyk (2006a,b), the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis will be tested. It assumes that phonotactics helps in decomposition of words into morphemes: if a certain sequence occurs only or only by default over a morpheme boundary and is thus a prototypical morphonotactic sequence, it should be processed faster and more accurately than a purely phonotactic sequence. Studies on typical and atypical first language acquisition in English, Lithuanian and Polish have shown significant differences between the acquisition of morphonotactic and pho- notactic consonant clusters: Morphonotactic clusters are acquired earlier and faster by typically developing children, but are more problematic for children with Specific Lan- guage Impairment. However, results on acquisition are less clear for German. The focus of this contribution is whether and how German-speaking adults differentiate between morphonotactic and phonotactic consonant clusters and vowel-consonant sequences in visual word recognition. It investigates whether sub-lexical letter sequences are found faster when the target sequence is separated from the word stem by a morphological boundary than when it is a part of a morphological root. An additional factor that is addressed concerns the position of the target cluster in the word. Due to the bathtub effect, sequences in peripheral positions in a word are more salient and thus facilitate processing more than word-internal positions. Moreover, for adults the primacy effect most favors word-initial position (whereas for young children the recency effect most favors word- final position). Our study discusses effects of phonotactic vs. morphonotactic cluster status and of position within the word. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Based on the theoretical framework of Dressler and Dziubalska-Kolaczyk (2006a,b), the Strong Morphonotactic Hy- pothesis is tested, which assumes that phonotactics helps in decomposition of words into morphemes: if a certain sequence * Corresponding author. Department of Linguistics, Comparative Psycholinguistics Research Group, University of Vienna, Porzellangasse 4/2/4, 1090 Vienna, Austria. Tel.: þ43 1 4277 44178. E-mail addresses: katharina.korecky-kroell@univie.ac.at, katharina@korecky.at (K. Korecky-Kröll). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.06.006 0388-0001/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language Sciences 46 (2014) 48–58