Irregular morphological priming and early morpho-orthographic segmentation

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 evidence showing that masked priming of irregular inflections (e.g., stole‑STEAL) does not differ from masked identity priming (Forster et al., 1987) or masked priming of regular inflections (e.g., walked-WALK; Meunier et al., 2004). 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 primes. These data are at odds with the existence of a pre‑lexical, orthographically‑based moprhological stage, unless very early feedback from central, semantically- and syntactically‑based stages of morphological processing is hypothesized.