Word Category Conversion Revisited: The Case of Adjectives and Participles in L1 and L2 German

One of the hypotheses about mental representation of conversion (i.e., zero-derivation) claims that converted forms are a product of a costly mental process that converts a word’s category into another one when needed, i.e., depending on the syntactic context in which the word appears. The empirical evidence for the claim is based primarily on self-paced reading experiments by Stolterfoht et al. (2010) in which they explored the assumed conversion of German verbs into adjectives in two syntactic contexts with past participles. In our priming study, we show that the effects that had been attributed to the conversion process are in fact frequency effects. In addition, based on our data we argue that past participles do not undergo any change in word class in either of the two syntactic contexts, which is consistent with, e.g., traditional German grammars. The same pattern of frequency effects was observed for German native speakers and advanced L2 German learners.