The contribution of prefixes to morphological processing of Spanish words

Abstract

Three series of priming experiments were conducted to probe the morphological and phonological contributions to visual word recognition in Spanish. Prefixed, e.g., INCAPAZ (incapable), and pseudoprefixed, e.g., INDUSTRIA (industry) target words were presented for recognition following a prefixed, e.g., infeliz (unhappy), or pseudoprefixed, e.g., insulto (insult), prime starting with the same syllable as the target, at masked short or long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). At long SOAs the recognition of prefixed targets was facilitated by prefixed primes and inhibited by pseudoprefixed ones, whereas both prefixed and pseudoprefixed primes facilitated the recognition at short SOAs. In contrast, the recognition of pseudoprefixed targets was unaffected by the kind of prime presented, even when we used pairs of words overlapping in syllables that cannot be prefixes in Spanish. These results support a special status for morphological elements in access to meaning in reading.

Keywords:

• Lexical access
• Morphological priming
• Morphology
• Phonology
• Prefix
• Regular language
• Syllable
• Visual word recognition

Acknowledgements

We thank Albrecht Inhoff and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported by Grant MEC-SEJ2004-03775 and SEJ2007-66860/PSIC from the Spanish Government to AD, predoctoral grants from Regional Program for Research of Principado de Asturias to MA (BP02–003) and JR-F (BP05-017), and by Grant MEC-SEJ2006-06712 from the Spanish Government to FC.

Notes

¹Stimuli are in quotation marks, targets are in capitals, primes are in lower case, translations are in italics.