Meaning is in the beholder’s eye: Morpho-semantic effects in masked priming

Marelli, Marco; Amenta, Simona; Morone, E; Crepaldi, Davide

doi:10.3758/s13423-012-0363-2

Cited by 40 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 21 publications

(25 reference statements)

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“…Second, in the studies supporting the form-thenmeaning account the dependent variable is reaction times in lexical decision, whereas in the present study the dependent variables are eye movement measures. The importance of these two differences was underlined also in the recent study by Marelli et al (2013), which showed that, when the task is not lexical decision and when the dependent variable is related to eye movements, the typical pattern observed in studies on morpho-orthographic decomposition is not found (only a priming effect of "brother" on "broth" was found); yet the typical effects are confirmed in the lexical decision task (i.e., a priming effect for "brother" on "broth" and "corner" on "corn", but not of "brothel" on "broth"). Thus, the results by Marelli et al (2013) 202 Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2014, 31 (1-2) ARCARA, SEMENZA, BAMBINI highlighted the contextual dependency of the effect on morpho-orthographic decomposition and suggest the importance of investigating different experimental settings.…”

Section: Word Structure Effects In Readingmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…The debate and the alternative models on morphological decomposition stem mostly from results of masked priming experiments in the context of a lexical decision task; it is possible that different tasks produce different results, however. For example, a recent study employing masked priming but in a different task requiring access of the meaning of the target word and using eye movement measures as dependent variable (Marelli, Amenta, Morone, & Crepaldi, 2013) found no evidence of decomposition of pseudomorphologically complex words (e.g., priming of "corner" on "corn"). On the contrary, early effects of morphosemantics were found (e.g., priming of "cleaner" on "clean").…”

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confidence: 96%

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Word structure and decomposition effects in reading

Arcara

Semenza

Bambini

2014

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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Theories on the processing of compound words differ on the role attributed to access to individual constituents. These theories are mostly based on empirical evidence obtained in experimental settings that could induce artificial effects normally not occurring in natural processing. In this study we investigated the processing of compounds as compared to noncompound complex words in Italian through a reading task with eye movement recording. We included both head-initial and head-final compounds, in order to test whether the position of the head may influence the reading process. After ruling out the effects of length and frequency, we observed that pseudocompounds (i.e., words with a segment homograph to a real word in the leftmost part) elicited longer total reading times than all other types of complex words, including compounds. Furthermore, head-final compounds elicited longer total reading times than head-initial compounds. The results suggest that a word structure resembling a compound may induce longer processing, presumably related to unexpected morphological structures. The results also converge with previous evidence that in some cases there is a higher processing costs for head-final as opposed to head-initial compounds, possibly indexing a reanalysis of the stimulus in order to correctly assign the constituent properties. However, a deeper analysis restricted to compounds revealed a more complex scenario where several variables interact with headedness (namely, first and second constituent frequency, compound frequency, and compound length), and future studies are needed to discriminate among possible interpretations. Overall, our findings suggest that longer reading times are related to solving incongruities due to noncanonical structures, rather than to morphologically complexity per se.

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Section: Word Structure Effects In Readingmentioning

confidence: 85%

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confidence: 96%

Word structure and decomposition effects in reading

Arcara

Semenza

Bambini

2014

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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“…Recent evidence suggests that morpho-orthographic segmentation might not be obligatory, as indicated by the fact that morpho-orthographic effects were not found in a masked primed semantic categorisation task (Marelli, Amenta, Morone, & Crepaldi, 2013), nor in a same-different judgment task (Duñabeitia, Kinoshita, Carreiras, & Norris, 2011). That is, semantically blind morphological decomposition appears to be at least partially task-dependent (Amenta, Marelli, & Crepaldi, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Morpho-orthographic segmentation without semantics

et al. 2015

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Masked priming studies have repeatedly provided evidence for a form-based morpho-orthographic segmentation mechanism that blindly decomposes any word with the mere appearance of morphological complexity (e.g., corn + er). This account has been called into question by Baayen et al. Psychological Review, 118, 438-482 (2011), who pointed out that the prime words previously tested in the morphoorthographic condition vary in the extent to which the suffix conveys regular meaning. In the present study, we investigated whether evidence for morpho-orthographic segmentation can be obtained with a set of tightly controlled prime words that are entirely semantically opaque. Using a visual lexical decision task, we compared priming from truly suffixed primes (hunter-HUNT), completely opaque pseudo-suffixed primes (corner-CORN), and non-suffixed primes (cashew-CASH). The results show comparable magnitudes of priming for the truly suffixed and pseudo-suffixed primes, and no priming from non-suffixed primes, and therefore provide further important evidence in support of morpho-orthographic segmentation processes operating in the absence of any possible role for semantics.

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“…For what concerns (b), the priming effect was smaller for opaque than transparent pairs in many of the studies considered (e.g., Diependaele et al, 2005; Feldman et al, 2009; Kazanina, 2011;Marelli, Amenta, Morone, & Crepaldi, 2013), a difference that obviously impacted on the collapsed mean latencies. For these reasons, in Experiment 1 we aimed at establishing the reliability of the effect by considering independent evidence from the British Lexicon Project (Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012).…”

Section: Orthography-semantics Consistencymentioning

confidence: 97%

Semantic Transparency in Free Stems: The Effect of Orthography-Semantics Consistency on Word Recognition

Marelli

Amenta

Crepaldi

2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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A largely overlooked side result in most studies of morphological priming is a consistent main effect of semantic transparency across priming conditions. That is, participants are faster at recognizing stems from transparent sets (e.g., farm) in comparison to stems from opaque sets (e.g., fruit), regardless of the preceding primes. This suggests that semantic transparency may be also consistently associated with some property of the stem word.We propose that this property might be traced back to the consistency, throughout the lexicon, between the orthographic form of a word and its meaning, here named Orthography-Semantics Consistency (OSC), and that an imbalance in OSC scores might explain the "stem transparency" effect. We exploited distributional semantic models to quantitatively characterize OSC, and tested its effect on visual word identification relying on large-scale data taken from the British Lexicon Project (BLP). Results indicated that (a) the "stem transparency" effect is solid and reliable, insofar it holds in BLP lexical decision times (Experiment 1); (b) an imbalance in terms of OSC can account for it (Experiment 2); and (c) more generally, OSC explains variance in a large item sample from BLP, proving to be an effective predictor in visual word access (Experiment 3).Keywords: Orthography-Semantics Consistency, distributional semantic models, megastudies, visual word identification Orthography-Semantics Consistency 3Semantic transparency in free stems: the effect of Orthography-Semantics Consistency in word recognition.Recent research on morphological processing has focused on the role played by semantic transparency in the recognition of derived words. Indeed, the meaning of a derived form can be more or less associated to the meanings of its constituent morphemes: words like nameless, farmer, bakery can be easily understood given the meaning of their roots (transparent words), whereas in words like courteous, fruitful, cryptic root meanings are not fully maintained (opaque words). How early semantic transparency comes to the stage during visual word processing has been the theoretical issue at the center of a long-standing debate (for a review, see . Priming was the main methodological tool adopted in addressing this question, with the assumption that, if the recognition of a root (e.g., farm) is made quicker by the previous presentation of a related derived form (e.g., farmer ) in comparison to a control prime (e.g., speaker ), this would mean that the root is accessed when processing the derived form. Typically, transparent and opaque derived primes are compared for their effectiveness in facilitating the identification of their (pseudo-)roots. In order to rule out any strategic effect related to prime awareness, the prime is often presented very shortly and preceded by an orthographic mask, making it virtually invisible at an explicit level (masked priming; Forster & Davis, 1984). Under these conditions, priming effect is regularly observed for both transparent and opaque prime-targe...

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Meaning is in the beholder’s eye: Morpho-semantic effects in masked priming

Cited by 40 publications

References 21 publications

Word structure and decomposition effects in reading

Word structure and decomposition effects in reading

Morpho-orthographic segmentation without semantics

Semantic Transparency in Free Stems: The Effect of Orthography-Semantics Consistency on Word Recognition

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