Early recognition of irregular words: evidence from morphological priming in English

Forster et al. (1987) and Meunier et al. (2004) investigated irregular morphological priming with short SOA; they both report equal facilitation when a stem is primed by itself (or a regular inflected word) and by an irregular related word. However, both these studies used only one set of control words, making impossible a perfect prime-control matching in both repetition/regular and irregular conditions. We replicated these lexical decision studies using similar SOA (40ms) and two different control word sets, each of which was matched for length, frequency, number of orthographic neighbours and orthographic overlap with either the repetition or the irregular prime list. The results show that there is a repetition priming effect, there is a borderline irregular priming effect, and this latter is smaller than the repetition effect, contrary to the previous findings. The consequence of these results for the models of complex word recognition will be discussed.