Balota et al. [Balota, D., Cortese, M., Sergent-Marshall, S., Spieler, D., & Yap, M. (2004). Visual word recognition for single-syllable words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283–316] studied lexical processing in word naming and lexical decision using hierarchical multiple regression techniques for a large data set of monosyllabic, morphologically simple words. The present study supplements their work by making use of more flexible regression techniques that are better suited for dealing with collinearity and non-linearity, and by documenting the contributions of several variables that they did not take into account. In particular, we included measures of morphological connectivity, as well as a new frequency count, the frequency of a word in speech rather than in writing. The morphological measures emerged as strong predictors in visual lexical decision, but not in naming, providing evidence for the importance of morphological connectivity even for the recognition of morphologically simple words. Spoken frequency was predictive not only for naming but also for visual lexical decision. In addition, it co-determined subjective frequency estimates and norms for age of acquisition. Finally, we show that frequency predominantly reflects conceptual familiarity rather than familiarity with a word’s form
684A common assumption in models of word recognition is that a word's orthographic form must be processed before its meaning can become available. With respect to morphology, researchers typically assume that later stages of word recognition are influenced by semantic properties of the stem but that initial stages are solely orthographic. Thus, the failure to detect differing magnitudes of facilitation for whiter-WHITE (semantically similar) and for corner-CORN (semantically dissimilar) prime-target pairs when primes are forward masked at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) provides primary support for an early morphoorthographic stage in models of morphological processing in English (for a review, see Rueckl & Aicher, 2008). A meta-analytic review of these priming effects, however, raises the possibility of very early semantic effects insofar as morphological facilitation is slightly greater after transparent (semantically similar) than after opaque (semantically dissimilar) primes. Collectively, the results demonstrate the risk of using a (null) finding about differing facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes to claim that parsability of a word's orthographic structure into a stem and an affix is devoid of morpho semantic structure (see Table 1). Limits on the form-then-meaning assumption are not limited to morphological models of word recognition. Near simultaneous access to the orthophonological and semantic properties of words is central to some current neurophysiological theories of lexical processing. For instance, Pulvermüller, Assadollahi, and Elbert (2001) and Pulvermüller, Shtyrov, and Ilmoniemi (2003) reported that all of the cortical subnetworks (including semantic aspects) related to the processing of a word automatically fire with the activation of the subnetworks that encode orthographic and/or phonological forms of the words. In essence, early access to the semantic properties of words does not seem to be a peculiarity of masked priming in the Many studies have suggested that a word's orthographic form must be processed before its meaning becomes available. Some interpret the (null) finding of equal facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes in early stages of morphological processing as consistent with this view. Recent literature suggests that morphological facilitation tends to be greater after transparent than after opaque primes, however. To determine whether the degree of semantic transparency influences parsing into a stem and a suffix (morphological decomposition) in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared patterns of facilitation between semantically transparent (e.g., coolant-COOL) and opaque (e.g., rampant-RAMP) primetarget pairs. Form properties of the stem (frequency, neighborhood size, and prime-target letter overlap), as well as related-unrelated and transparent-opaque affixes, were matched. Morphological facilitation was significantly greater for s...
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