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

Abstract

The present experiments were designed to explore the theory of early morpho-orthographic segmentation (Rastle, Davis, & New, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11,1090-1098, which postulates that written words with a true morphologically complex structure (cleaner) and those with a morphological pseudostructure (corner) are both decomposed into affix and stem morphemes. We used masked complex transposed-letter (TL) nonword primes in a lexical decision task. Experiment 1 replicated the wellknown masked TL-priming effect using monomorphemic nonword primes (e.g., wran-WARN). Experiment 2 used the same nonword TL stems as in Experiment 1, but combined them with real suffixes (e.g., ish as in wranish-WARN). Priming was compared with that from nonsuffixed primes in which the real suffixes were replaced with nonmorphemic endings (e.g., el as in wranel-WARN). Significant priming was found in the suffixed but not in the nonsuffixed condition, suggesting that affix-stripping occurs at prelexical stages in visual word recognition and operates over early letter-position encoding mechanisms.

Morpho-orthographic segmentation without semantics

“…On the other hand, the equivalent magnitudes of priming in the truly suffixed and pseudo-suffixed conditions are in line with a considerable number of studies suggesting that there must be an automatic, fast-acting morpho-orthographic segmentation mechanism that rapidly decomposes morphologically complex letter strings into morphemic units, independently from semantics (Beyersmann, Castles, & Coltheart, 2011;Diependaele et al, 2005Diependaele et al, , 2009Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2007;Rastle & Davis, 2008;Rastle et al, 2004;Taft, 2003;Taft & Ardasinski, 2006;Taft & Nguyen-Hoan, 2010). It has been proposed that morpho-orthographic segmentation is guided by some kind of 'affix-stripping' mechanism (firstly introduced by Taft & Forster, 1975), that matches input letter sequences with higher-level affix representations, while the remaining letter string activates the representation of the stem.…”

Morphological Decomposition in Reading Hebrew Homographs

“…A large body of previous research in Indo-European languages suggests morphological decomposition to occur at a prelexical stage for all morphologically complex words (Beyersmann et al 2011(Beyersmann et al , 2013Fiorentino and Poeppel 2007;Lavric et al 2007;Longtin and Meunier 2005;McCormick et al 2008;Meunier and Longtin 2007;Niswander-Klement and Pollatsek 2006;Rastle and Davis 2008;Solomyak and Marantz 2010;Taft 2004;Taft and Ardasinski 2006). Findings obtained from the three experiments seem to imply that this was not generally true in our study that investigated processes of morphological decomposition in Hebrew.…”

“…Furthermore, this evidence indicates that morphological processing fulfills a mediating function in connecting between a prelexical orthographic level and the semantic higher level processing of words (Dominguez et al 2004;McCormick et al 2009;Taft 2003;Taft and Nguyen-Hoan 2010). Of note, there is broad evidence suggesting that morphological decomposition occurs at a prelexical stage for all morphologically complex words (Beyersmann et al 2013(Beyersmann et al , 2011Bick et al 2009;Deutsch et al 2000Deutsch et al , 2005Fiorentino and Poeppel 2007;Lavric et al 2007;Longtin and Meunier 2005;McCormick et al 2008;Meunier and Longtin 2007;Niswander-Klement and Pollatsek 2006;Rastle and Davis 2008;Solomyak and Marantz 2010;Taft 2004;Taft and Ardasinski 2006).…”

The locus of impairment in English developmental letter position dyslexia

“…Single and double substitution items were included because both have previously been used in research as a comparison condition for migratable items (e.g. Perea and Lupker, 2004; Perea and Fraga, 2006; Beyersmann et al, 2011, 2012, 2013). …”