Do transposed-letter similarity effects occur at a morpheme level? Evidence for morpho-orthographic decomposition

Abstract

When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter similarity eVect (e.g., jugde facilitates JUDGE more than the control jupbe) in polymorphemic and monomorphemic words. If morphological decomposition occurs at early stages of visual word recognition, we would expect an interaction with transposed-letter eVects. Experiment 1 was carried out in Basque, which is an agglutinative language. The nonword primes were created by transposing two letters that either crossed the morphological boundaries of suYxes or did not. Results showed a transposed-letter eVect for non-aYxed words, whereas there were no signs of a transposed-letter eVect across morpheme boundaries for aYxed words. In Experiment 2, this issue was revisited in a non-agglutinative language (Spanish), with preWxed and suYxed word pairs. Again, results showed a signiWcant transposed-letter eVect for non-aYxed words, whereas there were no signs of a transposed-letter eVect across morpheme boundaries for aYxed words (both preWxed words and suYxed words). Experiment 3 replicated the previous Wndings, and also revealed that, for polymorphemic words,

The role of the frequency of constituents in compound words: Evidence from Basque and Spanish

“…Instead, both Spanish and Basque readers seem to have developed a word-tail-decomposition mechanism, in which the morphological analysis of a polymorphemic word is mainly centered on the latter part of the word-where morphological cues of words are generally posited (suffixes and/or second lexemes of compounds). This is consistent with the recent findings of Duñabeitia, Perea, and Carreiras (2007a), who found a language-independent mechanism of morphological decomposition in transposed-letter effects across morphemes for both Basque and Spanish. In addition, the transposedletter effect vanishes when the manipulation occurs within the internal letters of the second constituent (but not the first constituent) of compound words (Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2007b).…”

Semantic transparency and masked morphological priming: The case of prefixed words

“…The present experiments indeed show similar-sized advantages of opaque primes over form-control primes, as in earlier studies. In line with this conclusion, Duñabeitia, Perea, and Carreiras (2007) found that for suffixed and prefixed primes alike, transposing the bigram at the morpheme boundary had a detrimental effect on masked identity priming similar to the effect of inserting a new bigram (e.g., punismhent-punishment vs. punisvlent-punishment and dceode-decode vs. dviode-decode). Crucially, the same manipulation yielded significantly faster responses in the transposed condition with monomorphemic items, suggesting that the detrimental effects for derivational primes were due to disruption of the morpheme boundary.…”

Early morphological decomposition during visual word recognition: Evidence from masked transposed-letter priming

“…However, many questions still remain to be answered. For example, we note that other findings in relation to morpho-orthographic decomposition, such as the reported absence of priming when TL manipulations occur across morpheme boundaries (e.g., cleaenr) as opposed to within them (e.g., celaner; Christianson, Johnson, & Rayner, 2005;Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2007), would seem to rely on affix-stripping drawing on precise letter-position information and occurring after letter-position encoding has been resolved. Further research is needed to reveal the precise relationship between letter position coding and affix-stripping.…”