Abstract
The current study investigates to what extent masked morphological priming is modulated by language-particular properties, specifically by its writing system. We present results from two masked priming experiments investigating the processing of complex Japanese words written in less common (moraic) scripts. In Experiment 1, participants performed lexical decisions on target verbs; these were preceded by primes which were either (i) a past-tense form of the same verb, (ii) a stem-related form with the epenthetic vowel -i, (iii) a semantically-related form, and (iv) a phonologically-related form. Significant priming effects were obtained for prime types (i), (ii), and (iii), but not for (iv). This pattern of results differs from previous findings on languages with alphabetic scripts, which found reliable masked priming effects for morphologically related prime/target pairs of type (i), but not for non-affixal and semantically-related primes of types (ii), and (iii). In Experiment 2, we measured priming effects for prime/target pairs which are neither morphologically, semantically, phonologically nor - as presented in their moraic scripts—orthographically related, but which—in their commonly written form—share the same kanji, which are logograms adopted from Chinese. The results showed a significant priming effect, with faster lexical-decision times for kanji-related prime/target pairs relative to unrelated ones. We conclude that affix-stripping is insufficient to account for masked morphological priming effects across languages, but that language-particular properties (in the case of Japanese, the writing system) affect the processing of (morphologically) complex words.
Highlights
The processing of morphologically-complex words has been subject to considerable debate in the past two decades
The current study examines whether morpho-orthographic decomposition (“affix-stripping”) of morphologically complex words, as reported in masked morphological priming studies of languages with alphabetic scripts, is employed in a language with a different writing system
The current study investigated how the processing of complex words in Japanese is modulated by properties of its writing system
Summary
The processing of morphologically-complex words has been subject to considerable debate in the past two decades. A core question in this area of research concerns the mechanisms the processing system employs for morphologically-complex words during word recognition. A number of studies have used the masked priming technique to examine this question. Instead, masked priming is supposed to tap into subliminal processes involved in visual word recognition. A considerable number of studies have shown that native speakers can extract morphological information from inflected and derived words under masked priming conditions, by showing masked priming. Japanese has a mixed writing system consisting of kanji, the logographs adopted from Chinese, and kana, a syllable— mora-based phonographic writing system. Like the Chinese logographs, the Japanese kanji are associated with particular meanings. The kana script comes in two subtypes: hiragana and katakana
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