On the interaction of letter transpositions and morphemic boundaries

Abstract

Investigations of the impact of morphemic boundaries on transposed-letter (TL) priming effects have yielded conflicting results. Five masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the interaction of letter transpositions and morphemic boundaries with English suffixed derivations. Experiments 1–3 found that responses to monomorphemic target words (e.g., SPEAK) were facilitated to the same extent by morphologically related primes containing letter transpositions that did (SPEAEKR) or did not (SPEKAER) cross a morphemic boundary. This pattern was also observed in Experiments 4 and 5, in which the targets (e.g., SPEAKER) were the base forms of the TL primes. Thus, in these experiments the influence of the morphological structure of a TL prime did not depend on whether the letter transposition crossed a morphological boundary.

Keywords:

• Letter transpositions
• Morphological structure

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Institute for Child Health and Development grant P01 HD-001994 to Haskins Laboratories. Some of this research was conducted as part of the Anurag Rimzhim's Second Year Project at the University of Connecticut.

Notes

¹BLUST is not a morpheme in English, and hence BLUSTER is not decomposable as BLUST + ER.

²These variables include bigram frequency (Frankish & Turner, 2007; Perea & Carreiras, 2008), letter frequency (Lupker et al., 2008), letter position (Gomez et al., 2008; Perea & Lupker, 2004), pronounceability (Frankish & Turner, 2007), syllable structure (Lee & Taft, 2009), and language (Velan & Frost, 2007, 2009).

³This concern also applies to experiments employing monomorphemic words in which extant roots are concatenated with non-affix endings (e.g., BROTH/EL, QUART/Z). Baseline response times for conditions involving these words often differs from those for conditions involving seemingly well-matched morphologically complex words (cf. Feldman et al., 2009; McCormick et al., 2008; Rastle et al., 2004).

⁴We thank Jon Andoni Duñabeitia for this suggestion.

⁵Items used only in Experiment 3 and Experiment 4.