Must analysis of meaning follow analysis of form? A time course analysis.

Laurie B Feldman,Patrick A O’Connor,Kit W Cho,Fermín Moscoso Del Prado Martín,Petar Milin

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00111

Abstract

Many models of word recognition assume that processing proceeds sequentially from analysis of form to analysis of meaning. In the context of morphological processing, this implies that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings. Some interpret the apparent absence of differences in recognition latencies to targets (SNEAK) in form and semantically similar (sneaky-SNEAK) and in form similar and semantically dissimilar (sneaker-SNEAK) prime contexts at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 48 ms as consistent with this claim. To determine the time course over which degree of semantic similarity between morphologically structured primes and their targets influences recognition in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared facilitation for the same targets after semantically similar and dissimilar primes across a range of SOAs (34–100 ms). The effect of shared semantics on recognition latency increased linearly with SOA when long SOAs were intermixed (Experiments 1A and 1B) and latencies were significantly faster after semantically similar than dissimilar primes at homogeneous SOAs of 48 ms (Experiment 2) and 34 ms (Experiment 3). Results limit the scope of form-then-semantics models of recognition and demonstrate that semantics influences even the very early stages of recognition. Finally, once general performance across trials has been accounted for, we fail to provide evidence for individual differences in morphological processing that can be linked to measures of reading proficiency.

Highlights

Models of visual word recognition typically assume that some information about the form of a word must be available before access to the word’s meaning is possible
Principal Component Analysis A set of target attributes documented to be relevant in word recognition including log-transformed frequency, counts reported in the HAL study (Burgess and Livesay, 1998), log-transformed SUBTLEX frequency per million words (Brysbaert and New, 2009), word length, and form related neighborhood measures: number of orthographic neighbors (ON), number of phonological neighbors (PN), average distance to ONs (OLD20), and average distance to PNs (PLD20) were collected from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al, 2007)
stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) in Experiment 1 was manipulated within an experimental block so as to enable us to track the time course of semantic contributions to morphological processing in a context where participants presumably apply the same processes to each trial

Summary

Introduction

Models of visual word recognition typically assume that some information about the form of a word must be available before access to the word’s meaning is possible. When applied to the domain of morphological processing, one might argue that a morpheme is processed as a unit of form prior to any influence of its meaning. This stronger claim is controversial because the classical linguistic position is that morphemes are both, units of form and units of meaning. This contradiction is worthy of further investigation.

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion