New evidence has emerged in recent years suggesting that the recognition of morphologically‑complex words starts with a rapid morphemic segmentation that is orthographically based (Rastle & Davis, 2008). This evidence appears inconsistent with data showing masked priming of irregular inflections over their base forms (e.g., fell‑FALL) as compared to orthographically matched control words (fill‑FALL; Pastizzo & Feldman, 2002), suggesting the existence of morphological bounds independent of orthography at the earliest stage of printed word recognition. However, these data are not completely consistent and have also been challenged by Voga & Grainger (2004) and Kielar et al. (2008). We carried out a masked priming experiment (SOA=42 ms) with a lexical decision task comparing the facilitation triggered by (i) irregular inflected primes (e.g., dug‑DIG), (ii) orthographically‑matched, but morphologically unrelated primes (dog‑DIG) and (iii) completely unrelated primes (pop‑DIG). Results showed that irregular inflections facilitate recognition of their stems significantly more than orthographically matched (t36=2.80, p < .01) and unrelated primes (t36=3.33, p < .005; see Table 1). As several irregular present‑past pairs form isles of sub‑regularity (e.g., bend‑bent, lend‑lent, send‑sent), this effect might generalize to unrelated words showing the same orthographic pattern (tend‑tent). This has been tested in Experiment 2, which was completely identical to Experiment 1 except for the fact that pseudo‑present‑past pairs were used (e.g., bake‑book, ray‑raid and peak‑poke). Results showed no effect whatsoever in this condition (F2,72=.24, p=.78; see Table 1). Across‑experiment ANOVAs were also carried out to check for interaction, which was significant by subjects (F2,152=4.02, p=.02) and approached significance by items (F2,144=2.59, p=.08), showing that irregular masked priming effect is truly morphological in nature. These data are at odds with the existence of a pre‑lexical, orthographically‑based morphological stage, unless very early feedback from central, semantically- and syntactically‑based stages of morphological processing is hypothesized.
Crepaldi, D., Rastle, K., Coltheart, M., Nickels, L. (2008). Early morpho-orthographic segmentation and masked irregular priming. Intervento presentato a: Pre-psychonomic Symposium on Lexical Processing, Chicago, IL, USA.
Early morpho-orthographic segmentation and masked irregular priming
CREPALDI, DAVIDE;
2008
Abstract
New evidence has emerged in recent years suggesting that the recognition of morphologically‑complex words starts with a rapid morphemic segmentation that is orthographically based (Rastle & Davis, 2008). This evidence appears inconsistent with data showing masked priming of irregular inflections over their base forms (e.g., fell‑FALL) as compared to orthographically matched control words (fill‑FALL; Pastizzo & Feldman, 2002), suggesting the existence of morphological bounds independent of orthography at the earliest stage of printed word recognition. However, these data are not completely consistent and have also been challenged by Voga & Grainger (2004) and Kielar et al. (2008). We carried out a masked priming experiment (SOA=42 ms) with a lexical decision task comparing the facilitation triggered by (i) irregular inflected primes (e.g., dug‑DIG), (ii) orthographically‑matched, but morphologically unrelated primes (dog‑DIG) and (iii) completely unrelated primes (pop‑DIG). Results showed that irregular inflections facilitate recognition of their stems significantly more than orthographically matched (t36=2.80, p < .01) and unrelated primes (t36=3.33, p < .005; see Table 1). As several irregular present‑past pairs form isles of sub‑regularity (e.g., bend‑bent, lend‑lent, send‑sent), this effect might generalize to unrelated words showing the same orthographic pattern (tend‑tent). This has been tested in Experiment 2, which was completely identical to Experiment 1 except for the fact that pseudo‑present‑past pairs were used (e.g., bake‑book, ray‑raid and peak‑poke). Results showed no effect whatsoever in this condition (F2,72=.24, p=.78; see Table 1). Across‑experiment ANOVAs were also carried out to check for interaction, which was significant by subjects (F2,152=4.02, p=.02) and approached significance by items (F2,144=2.59, p=.08), showing that irregular masked priming effect is truly morphological in nature. These data are at odds with the existence of a pre‑lexical, orthographically‑based morphological stage, unless very early feedback from central, semantically- and syntactically‑based stages of morphological processing is hypothesized.
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