The activation of embedded (pseudo-)stems in auditory lexical processing: implications for models of spoken word recognition

ABSTRACT

A large literature on visual word recognition has examined the role of (apparent) morphological structure by comparing suffixed (such as treatment), pseudo-suffixed (pigment), and non-suffixed (dogma) words with respect to their embeddings (treat, pig, dog). We examined the processing of these word types, as well as semantic controls, in an auditory primed lexical decision paradigm. The results show significant priming in all conditions relative to an unrelated baseline, with larger priming effects for truly suffixed words than for pseudo-suffixed and non-suffixed words. The results suggest that initial embeddings are activated in spoken word processing, and remain active in ways that do not depend on (apparent) morphological structure. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of lexical access that predict inhibition of disfavoured competitors and models that hold that attempted decomposition is driven by meaning relatedness between the carrier word and its possible embedded stem(s).

KEYWORDS:

• Morphological processing
• embeddings
• pseudo-suffixed words
• spoken word recognition
• stem priming

Acknowledgments

Many thanks are due to Robert J. Wilder and Amy Goodwin Davies for invaluable help and feedback. Thanks are also due to Akiva Bacovcin, Kobey Shwayder, Roberto Petrosino, the members of the Embick lab and the Language Variation and Cognition Lab at Penn, and the audiences at the 11th International Conference on the Mental Lexicon and the 10th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on the OSF: https://osf.io/whgfy/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 http://lsa.colorado.edu/.

2 In 69 instances in our data from 24 participants, the responses occurred prior to the end of the word being presented; these early responses did not result in the sound file being truncated. In these instances the ITI was measured from the end of that word. After data trimming (see below), only one of these instances remained.

3 Recall that we also included an ITI manipulation in the present experiment, the results of which can be found in the supplemental materials; similar priming effects are found even with a relatively long ITI of 1000–1200 ms, suggesting that the activation is still present after further time has elapsed.

4 A further question of interest concerns how cross-linguistic differences in syllable structure might manifest themselves in the activation of embeddings; for example, the French (pseudo-)affixes employed in Beyersmann et al. (2019) appear to be vowel initial, and thus induce resyllabification of the (pseudo-)stem; stress properties of French versus English would also be relevant here (see Zhang & Samuel, 2015, for discussion). Our experiment was not designed to probe this particular set of points, as the stimuli were mixed with respect to whether and how much resyllabification of the embedding is involved in primes. Syllabic effects could be manipulated in further work to determine their influence on how they affect the activation of embeddings, both within and across languages. For review and discussion of how syllabic effects might be manifested in the visual modality, see Petrosino (2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant number R01HD073258].