Are CORNER and BROTHER morphologically complex? Not in the long term

Abstract

Previous studies haves shown that under masked priming conditions, CORNER primes CORN as strongly as TEACHER primes TEACH and more strongly than BROTHEL primes BROTH. This result has been taken as evidence of a purely structural level of representation at which words are decomposed into morphological constituents in a manner that is independent of semantics. The research reported here investigated the influence of semantic transparency on long-term morphological priming. Two experiments demonstrated that while lexical decisions were facilitated by semantically transparent primes like TEACHER, semantically opaque words like CORNER had no effect. Although differences in the nonword foils used in each experiment gave rise to somewhat different patterns of results, this difference in the effects of transparent and opaque primes was found in both experiments. The implications of this finding for accounts of morphological effects on visual word identification are discussed.

Keywords:

• Morphological processing
• Reading
• Visual word recognition

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Institute for Child Health and Development grant HD-01994 to Haskins Laboratories. The authors wish to thank Steven Katz, Aristotle Theophanis, and Doug Yovanovich for their help with the data collection.

Notes

¹To the extent possible, the labels for our nonword conditions are consistent with the terminology used by Longtin and Meunier (2005).

²In the baseline condition, responses were slowest for form targets and fastest for transparent targets. The same pattern was found by Rastle et al. (2004), where the differences were more pronounced.

³By ‘learning’ here we mean the process that results in the creation of new lexical representations. Although adjustments in thresholds or baseline activation values could be seen as learning in the sense that these adapt a reader to his or her environment, these sorts of mechanisms entail that lexical representations already exist, and thus activation accounts of decouple priming from the processes involved in the acquisition of new representations.