Early morphological processing is morphosemantic and not simply morpho-orthographic: A violation of form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition

Abstract

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...

The role of form in morphological priming: Evidence from bilinguals

“…Diependaele et al explored morphological priming in a masked priming lexical decision task with semantically transparent and opaque derivational relationships, as well as form-related items (e.g., walker-WALK vs. corner-CORN vs. freeze-FREE; see , with a group of native English speakers and two groups of bilinguals with varying levels of proficiency in their English (L2) levels. Interestingly, results showed similar priming patterns for the native participants and the two groups of bilinguals (i.e., no significant differences in the magnitude of the morphological priming effects), in line with recent studies on L1 masked morphological priming for derived words and their stems Feldman et al, 2009). Hence, according to the Diependaele et al data, at medium and high levels of L2 proficiency, derived words from a nonnative language are decomposed early and accessed through the constituent morphemes in a fashion similar to that from a native language.…”

“…However, one of the major findings in morphological processing research of the last decade is that, at least within the first processing stages, morphological relationships are not only exploited on a semantic basis, but also on a purely orthographic one (see ; see also Diependaele et al, 2011, for a demonstration of morpho-orthographic priming effects in a second language). Specifically, priming effects for semantically opaque or pseudo-complex items (e.g., department-DEPART or corner-CORN) are typically larger than for control items that do not share an apparent morphological relationship (e.g., freeze-FREE; Feldman, O'Connor, & Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2009). There is broad agreement that such morpho-orthographic decomposition takes place at a sub-lexical ortho-phonological processing level.…”

A dynamic approach to recognition memory.

“…Our account of the data of depends on the assumption that plurality information is available late in the trial, while semantic features (that do not on their own convey any information about plurality) are available early, a view consistent with the early availability of semantic information in word recognition (Feldman, O'Connor, & Del Prado Martín, 2009). That is, the features that distinguish between a target and a similar foil are of different kinds.…”

Real-time Functional Architecture of Visual Word Recognition

“…This morpho-orthographic approach is not, however, fully supported either behaviorally (e.g., Diependaele, Sandra, & Grainger, 2009;Feldman, OʼConnor, & del Prado Martín, 2009) or in neuroimaging studies of visual word recognition, where support can be found for contrasting morphosemantic (or interactive) approaches, which claim that early orthographic analysis is modulated by top-down lexical and semantic constraints (e.g., .…”