ABSTRACT
Studies have aimed to tease apart ‘thinking for speaking' from general cognition and have shown that language-specific differences can often be observed in verbalisation as well as in the preverbal preparation phase of speech production, rather than in non-linguistic tasks. Priming studies suggest that the activation of an opaque compound's head does not facilitate access to the whole compound. However, there might be more subtle effects on conceptualisation. Subjects saw a series of animal pictures and had to indicate in each case which of two kinds of animals, identified in a pair of small pictures, they regarded as more similar to an animal identified in a large picture. English and German speakers differed significantly in their responses. English speakers chose related probes more often than Germans in the ‘hedgehog’-cases, and less often than Germans in the ‘shieldtoad’-cases. This result suggests that compound structure had indeed an effect on the perceived similarity of referents.
