The developing mental lexicon: evidence from morphological priming of irregular Hebrew forms

Abstract

This study investigated the development of automatic word recognition processes, in particular the development of the morphological level of processing. We examined masked priming of Hebrew irregular forms at two levels of reading experience. Both third-and seventh-grade children showed morphological priming for defective roots when primes and targets conformed to the canonical morphological structure, containing all three letters of the roots, and also when the surface form of the primes and targets contained only two of the root letters. However, priming was not observed when primes and targets did not overlap in the surface form of the roots, i.e. the full three-letter root as prime and only two root letters in the target. These results suggest that both tri-and bi-consonantal representations of defective roots exist in the mental lexicon of young readers. The formation of interconnections between these allomorphic representations, however, requires more extensive reading experience.Keywords Development · Mental lexicon · Morphological processing · Morphological priming · Word recognition Research on the linguistic knowledge of young children has focused on the ability of children to identify and manipulate sub-word morphemic units. This morphological knowledge, demonstrated in both oral and visual tasks, is acquired early and continues to develop throughout the years of elementary school (for a review, see

Holistic versus analytic processing: Evidence for a different approach to processing of Chinese at the word and character levels in Chinese children

“…These authors suggested that children were indeed sensitive to the morphological structure of words during reading based on these findings. Similar results were reported by Schiff, Raveh, and Kahta (2008) for third through seventh graders reading Hebrew and by Verhoven et al (2006) for third and sixth graders learning Dutch. However, few (if any) such studies have been conducted on this issue in Chinese.…”

“…On the word level, analytic processing and the processing of specific morphemes have been documented in several studies of adults in both alphabetic languages, such as English (e.g., Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994;Taft, 2004) and Chinese (e.g., Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1995;Zhou, Marslen-Wilson, Taft, & Shu, 1999). Additional studies suggest that children's word processing is also influenced at least in part by the morphemes within the words (e.g., Casalis, Dusautoir, Cole, & Ducrot, 2009;McCutchen, Logan, & Biangardi-Orpe, 2009;Schiff, Raveh, & Kahta, 2008;Verhoeven, Schreuder, & Haarman, 2006). For instance, Casalis, Dusautoir, Cole, and Ducrot (2009), using a priming lexical decision paradigm, found that French fourth graders showed a significant positive priming effect when targets (derived words) were preceded by primes that shared a morphological relationship with the targets even though this effect could not be distinguished from the purely orthographic effect at a short prime duration.…”

The role of form and meaning in the processing of written morphology: A priming study in French developing readers

“…Similarly, French second graders are more accurate when reading aloud pseudowords made up of morphemes (e.g., mordage, where an equivalent in English could be ''bitage'') than pseudowords with only a suffix (e.g., soumage, where an equivalent in English could be ''somage'') (Marec-Breton, Gombert, & Colé, 2005). Morphological processing in reading has also been evidenced in Hebrew morphology in third and seventh graders (Schiff, Raveh, & Kahta, 2008) and in the Italian regular orthography in third to fifth graders (Burani, Marcolini, & Stella, 2002).…”

The Development of the Hebrew Mental Lexicon: When Morphological Representations Become Devoid of Their Meaning

“…Even second and third graders showed strong visual morphological priming when the prime and the target words shared a root (Schiff, 2003;Schiff, Raveh, & Kahta, 2008;Yamin & Raveh, 2005). In a recent study, Schiff et al (2008) further examined the development of the morphological organization of the mental lexicon of young readers by using morphologically irregular Hebrew forms within a paradigm previously used by Velan, Frost, Deutsch, and Plaut (2005) to test adult Hebrew readers.…”

“…Even second and third graders showed strong visual morphological priming when the prime and the target words shared a root (Schiff, 2003;Schiff, Raveh, & Kahta, 2008;Yamin & Raveh, 2005). In a recent study, Schiff et al (2008) further examined the development of the morphological organization of the mental lexicon of young readers by using morphologically irregular Hebrew forms within a paradigm previously used by Velan, Frost, Deutsch, and Plaut (2005) to test adult Hebrew readers. Similar to the results found for adults (Frost, Deutsch, & Forster, 2000;Velan et al, 2005), the priming pattern observed with third-and seventh-grade children suggested the existence of allomorphic representations for irregular roots.…”