Chapter 17 Morphological Analysis in Word Recognition

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews evidence of morphological processing in word recognition. Studies of morphology that employ the repetition priming techniques are described. Morphological and orthographic similarity effects are contrasted because alternative accounts of morphological effects in word recognition often minimize the role of the morpheme unit and focus on orthographic and phonological similarity of morphologically-related words. Morphological effects are differentiated from effects because of semantic association, although both are based on word meaning. The repetition priming procedure is a viable tool for studying the ways in which morphological relationships among words are represented in the lexicon; however, a confounding episodic contribution to the pattern of facilitation can also occur. It is important, therefore, to differentiate morphological effects from episodic and other types of facilitation and to provide converging evidence of morphological analysis from other word recognition tasks. Morphological effects have also been observed in sentence verification and oral reading tasks. Morphological and syntactic facilitation effects are examined in a sentence comprehension task. A common underlying skill for morphological and phonological analysis is revealed.