Abstract
Research on visual word identification has extensively investigated the role of morphemes, recurrent letter chunks that convey a fairly regular meaning (e.g., lead-er-ship). Masked priming studies highlighted morpheme identification in complex (e.g., sing-er) and pseudo-complex (corn-er) words, as well as in nonwords (e.g., basket-y). The present study investigated whether such sensitivity to morphemes could be rooted in the visual system sensitivity to statistics of letter (co)occurrence. To this aim, we assessed masked priming as induced by nonword primes obtained by combining a stem (e.g., bulb) with (i) naturally frequent, derivational suffixes (e.g., -ment), (ii) non-morphological, equally frequent word-endings (e.g., -idge), and (iii) non-morphological, infrequent word-endings (e.g., -kle). In two additional tasks, we collected interpretability and word-likeness measures for morphologically-structured nonwords, to assess whether priming is modulated by such factors. Results indicate that masked priming is not affected by either the frequency or the morphological status of word-endings, a pattern that was replicated in a second experiment including also lexical primes. Our findings are in line with models of early visual processing based on automatic stem/word extraction, and rule out letter chunk frequency as a main player in the early stages of visual word identification. Nonword interpretability and word-likeness do not affect this pattern.
Highlights
Reading is a critical skill in our everyday life, and for skilled readers the processing of linguistic input unfolds rapidly and effortlessly
Consistent evidence encompassing many languages and experimental paradigms suggests that morphology does play a role during the earliest stages of visual word identification, even if there is little consensus on the fundamental mechanisms that are in place at such level of processing (Amenta & Crepaldi, 2012)
An intriguing proposal came from computational work (e.g., Baayen, Milin, Ðurdevic, Hendrix, & Marelli, 2011), which capitalizes on discriminative learning in the context of a mapping effort between orthography and semantics, and provides evidence for morphological effects without explicit morpheme representations (i.e., -er)
Summary
Reading is a critical skill in our everyday life, and for skilled readers the processing of linguistic input unfolds rapidly and effortlessly. Several theoretical accounts postulate morphoorthographic processing to depend on explicit levels of representation, with earlier proposals offering morphology itself as a primary organizational principle (e.g., Rastle & Davis, 2003; Taft, 1994). Most of these models do not reckon with recent evidence coming from nonword primes, which produce strong facilitation even without a complete morphological structure (e.g., Beyersmann, Casalis, Ziegler, & Grainger, 2015; Beyersmann, Cavalli, Casalis, & Cole, 2016; Hasenacker, Beyersmann, & Schroeder, 2016; Grainger & Beyersmann, 2020)
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