Decomposition into multiple morphemes during lexical access: A masked priming study of Russian nouns

Abstract

The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) transparent, in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the diminutive suffix -k, e.g., gorka ‘little mountain’ – gora ‘mountain’; (2) pseudo-derived, in which there was an apparent but false morphological relation between the prime and the target similar to that in the transparent condition, e.g., lunka ‘hole’ – luna ‘moon’; and (3) form, in which the phonological/orthographic overlap between the prime and the target was coincidental and could not be misanalysed as due to morphological reasons, e.g., as parta ‘desk’ – para ‘pair’. A facilitatory priming effect was found for targets in the transparent and pseudo-derived conditions but not in the form condition. The findings support the hypothesis that at an early stage of lexical processing, morphological decomposition is automatic and is not obligatorily governed by semantic transparency (Taft, 1979; Taft & Forster, 1975). Furthermore, the process of decomposition appears to apply until smallest possible morpheme-sized units are obtained.

Acknowledgements

We thank Robert Fiorentino for his thorough comments on an earlier version of the manuscript which led to various improvements of the paper. We also thank Tatyana Kharlamova for her help in collecting semantic relatedness data and Adrienne Jones for stylistic advice. We also gratefully acknowledge the feedback from two anonymous reviewers and the audience of the 5^th International Conference on the Mental Lexicon (Montreal, October 2006). This project was supported by the University of Ottawa research grants #106634 and #107837 to NK.

Notes

¹We use small capitals to indicate the target word.

²An assumption that accompanies this reasoning is that the masked priming task taps into rather an earlier, pre-selection stage of word processing than an unmasked priming task due to the different times allocated for processing the prime. In a masked priming task the limited time allotted for the processing of the prime is only sufficient to access lemmas of (true or apparent) morphological constituents that comprise the prime. Therefore all targets that stand in a true or apparent morphological relation with the prime are facilitated. In an unmasked priming task, on the other hand, there is sufficient time to continue the processing of the prime to access its semantics, either through recombining the meanings of morphological constituents (as in the case of a semantically transparent prime) or through accessing the concept that is linked idiosyncratically to the whole word (as in the case of a semantically opaque prime). Hence only targets that are true morphological (and, therefore, semantic) relatives of the prime are facilitated (see Allen & Badecker, 1999, and Badecker & Allen, 2002, for similar findings using stem homographs and for an additional discussion on a masked vs. unmasked priming technique).

³Both Longtin et al. (2003) and Rastle et al. (2004) interpret the claims in Marslen-Wilson et al. (1994) as suggesting that semantic transparency is a crucial factor both in terms of the long-term memory representations and for triggering morphological decomposition during lexical retrieval. For example, Rastle and colleagues characterise Marslen-Wilson et al. (1994) as proposing that ‘decomposition of polymorphemic words is governed by semantic transparency’ (Rastle et al. 2004, p. 1093). Our interpretation of Marslen-Wilson et al.'s (1994) claims is somewhat different. Their explicit argument to dispense with an obligatory morphological decomposition during lexical retrieval targets phonologically opaque but semantically transparent forms (e.g., divinity or sanity, p. 30) rather than phonologically transparent but semantically opaque forms that are the focus of the current paper. As for semantically opaque words, we take the authors’ claim to be that such forms are stored as holistic monomorphemic items, i.e., semantic transparency is argued to be a factor for representation of complex forms in the long-term memory, rather than a factor that affects an immediate online retrieval of these forms.

⁴Such a position is broadly compatible with the idea that different languages may weigh the decompositional route differently depending how useful each route proves in light of the language morphology type (Marslen-Wilson, 2001). In languages with rich morphological structure, such as Russian, an early automatic decomposition may have a stronger weight than in languages with limited use of morphology, such as Mandarin. It also does not exclude the possibility that regular complex words also ‘leave traces’ in lexical memory (see Baayen 2007, for a review).

⁵A possible exception is one pair in the form condition, lapša ‘noodles’ – lapa ‘paw’, in which the consonant that distinguished the prime and the target coincided with an existing nominal suffix in Russian: the suffix šcan be added to a masculine root (usually an occupational term) to obtain its feminine counterpart, e.g., kapitan ‘captain.masc’ – kapitan-š-a ‘captain.fem’. However, the root lap- is feminine, which makes the representation of the prime lapša ‘noodles’ as lap-š-a illicit if the gender of the root morpheme is taken into account.