No abstract

Developing readers have been shown to rely on morphemes in visual word recognition across several naming, lexical decision and priming experiments. However, the impact of morphology in reading is not consistent across studies with differing results emerging not only between but also within writing systems. Here, we report a cross-language experiment involving the English and French languages, which aims to compare directly the impact of morphology in word recognition in the two languages. Monolingual French-speaking and English-speaking children matched for grade level (Part 1) and for age (Part 2) participated in the study. Two lexical decision tasks (one in French, one in English) featured words and pseudowords with exactly the same structure in each language. The presence of a root (R+) and a suffix ending (S+) was manipulated orthogonally, leading to four possible combinations in words (R+S+: e.g., postal; R+S−: e.g., turnip; R−S+: e.g., rascal; and R-S-: e.g., bishop) and in pseudowords (R+S+: e.g., pondal; R+S−: e.g., curlip; R−S+: e.g., vosnal; and R−S−: e.g., hethop). Results indicate that the presence of morphemes facilitates children's recognition of words and impedes their ability to reject pseudowords in both languages. Nevertheless, effects extend across accuracy and latencies in French but are restricted to accuracy in English, suggesting a higher degree of morphological processing efficiency in French. We argue that the inconsistencies found between languages emphasize the need for developmental models of word recognition to integrate a morpheme level whose elaboration is tuned by the productivity and transparency of the derivational system.

We investigated whether children with dyslexia rely on derivational morphology during visual word recognition and how the semantic and form properties of morphemes influence this processing. We conducted two masked priming experiments, in which we manipulated the semantic overlap (Experiment 1) and the form overlap (Experiment 2) between morphologically related pairs of words. In each experiment, French dyslexic readers as well as reading-level matched and chronological-age matched children performed a lexical decision task. Significant priming effects were observed in all groups, indicating that their lexicon is organized around morpheme units. Furthermore, the dyslexics' processing of written morphology is mainly influenced by the semantic properties of morphemes, whereas children from the two control groups are mainly influenced by their form properties.

We examined whether French third and fifth grade children rely on morphemes when recognizing words, and whether this reliance depends on word familiarity. We manipulated the presence of bases and suffixes in words and pseudowords to compare their contribution in a lexical decision task. Both bases and suffixes facilitated word reading accuracy and speed across all grades, even though the co-occurrence of a base and a suffix reduced the benefit associated to the presence of morphemes in third grade children. Speed of pseudoword (i.e. unfamiliar word) reading was also influenced by base and suffix, and the combination of these units leaded to a high rate of false alarms. These results bring new evidence of morphological analysis in the reading of French familiar and unfamiliar words.