Morphological relationship revealed through the repetition priming task

Abstract

Attempts to study morphology experimentally are not new. One methodology for exploring a speakers' knowledge about morphological relationships among words asks subjects directly to judge which words have. internal .morphologi.cal structure. Variants of the method Include askIng whether a complex word comes from a certain base or alternatively, whether pairs of words share some morphological component (e.g., Derwing, 1976, 1986). A second methodology looks for improved performance (Le., perceptual threshold sensitivity or recognition fluency) over successive presentations of a base morpheme. One task using this methodology employs a vari~t~on of the lexical decision task known as repetition priming. Here, morphological variants of a bas~ word are presented and the pattern of facilitation among related forms is interpreted to reflect, at least in part, how those forms are organized in the lexicon of the user. In the repetition priming procedure (Forbach, Stanners & Hochhaus, 1974; Scarborough, Cortese, S Stanners, Neiser, Hernon, & Hall, 1979), each word and pseudoword is presented twice for a lexical decision judgment. The reduction in decision latency relative to a first presentation, that is, the facilitation due to repetition is measured. (The first presentation of the iterr: is the prime. The second presentation is the target.) For facilitation to occur it is not necessary that the identical word be repeated as prime and target. Generally, morphologi~all~related words including inflections and derIVations also reduce target lexical decision latencies-