Morphological decomposition supports word recognition in primary school children learning to read: evidence from masked priming of German derived words

Abstract

BackgroundWhen reading a word, skilled adult readers automatically decompose the word into its separate morphemes by processing the word's morpho‐orthography. In children, however, it still remains unclear when and how they start to automatically decompose words into morphemes.MethodsTo better understand how primary school children learn and integrate automatic morphological processes into their reading, we conducted a masked priming experiment with n = 218 first to fourth graders and a control group of 36 adult readers. Participants saw prime words on a computer screen for 67 ms, followed by a lexical decision task. For each target word, we constructed three prime words: an unrelated control prime, a semantic control prime and a test prime. The test prime was either morpho‐semantically, morpho‐orthographically or purely orthographically related to the target word. We analysed error rates and reaction times with linear mixed‐effects models and linear combinations.ResultsThe error analysis revealed one significant interaction in the morpho‐semantic condition for fourth graders. The reaction time analysis revealed different priming effects depending on age group: first and second graders showed no priming effects, while third graders showed priming in the morpho‐semantic condition, and fourth graders and adults showed priming both in the morpho‐semantic and morpho‐orthographic condition.ConclusionsWe conclude that (i) fourth graders automatically decompose written words into morphemes based on the words' morpho‐orthography, (ii) third graders automatically detect stems in morphologically complex forms but do not rely on morpho‐orthographic representations while (iii) first and second graders show no indication of either of these processes. Our results are theoretically consistent with the ‘semantic view’ within a localist account and can be explained by edge‐aligned embedded word activation.