Morpheme position coding in reading development as explored with a letter search task

Abstract

Suffixes have been shown to be recognized as units of processing in visual word recognition and their identification has been argued to be position-specific in skilled adult readers: in lexical decision tasks suffixes are automatically identified at word endings, but not at word beginnings. The present study set out to investigate whether position-specific coding can be detected with a letter search task and whether children already code suffixes as position-specific units. A preregistered experiment was conducted in Italian in which 3rd-graders, 5th-graders, and adults had to detect a target letter that was either contained in the suffix of a pseudoword (e.g., S in flagish vs. flagosh) or in a non-suffix control (e.g., S in flagish vs. flagosh). To investigate sensitivity to position, letters also had to be detected in suffixes and non-suffixes placed in reversed position, that is in the beginning of pseudowords (e.g., S in ishflag vs. oshflag). Results suggested position-specific processing differences between suffixes and non-suffixes that develop throughout reading development. However, some effects were weak and only partially compatible with the hypotheses. Therefore, a second experiment was conducted. The effects of position-specific suffix identification could not be replicated. A combined analysis additionally using a Bayesian approach indicated no processing differences between suffixes and non-suffixes in our task. We discuss potential interpretations and the possibility of letter search being unsuited to investigate small processing differences. We connect our example of failed self-replication to the current discussion about the replication crisis in psychology and the lesson psycholinguistics can learn.

Letter chunk frequency does not explain morphological masked priming

“…This clearly speaks against the idea that the frequency of letter chunks is a primary driver during visual word identification. However, letter search is not the paradigm where morpho-orthographic effects are typically found, and the efficacy of this task in addressing morphological processing has been recently questioned (Hasenäcker, Ktori, & Crepaldi, 2021).…”