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ABSTRACT
Masked priming studies have shown that readers decompose morphologically complex words (read+er). Interindividual differences have been suggested to affect this phenomenon. However, its development is poorly understood. We addressed this issue by taking a longitudinal approach that allows greater rigor in establishing the relationship between grade, reading skill, and morphological priming. A masked priming lexical decision task with suffixed words (kleidchen-KLEID), suffixed nonwords (kleidtum-KLEID), non-suffixed nonwords (kleidekt-KLEID) and unrelated primes (träumerei-KLEID) was administered to 98 children in grade 2, and again in grade 3 and 4 of elementary school. Reading skill was measured at each testing point. Grade and reading skill were associated with distinct patterns of priming: all priming effects increased with reading skill, whereas priming from non-suffixed nonwords decreased with grade. This suggests that the ability to identify stems can be associated with reading skills, while sensitivity to affixes is acquired over grades.
Disclosure Statement
The authors state that they have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Ethics approval statement
The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.
Informed consent
Written consent for participation was obtained from the parents of the participating children and oral consent was asked from the children.
Notes
1. Note that Grainger and Beyersmann (Citation2017) argue that the principle of edge-aligned embedded stem activation is not generalizable to languages like Hebrew in which Semitic stems function as bound morphemes, because it hinges on the key principle of stems as free-standing units. For several Indo-European languages (English, French, German), evidence for embedded stem priming has been reported. Cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing have been found to arise as a consequence of orthographic transparency (Mousikou et al., Citation2020) and/or morphological productivity (Beyersmann et al., Citationin press). In a similar vein, non-cross-linguistic studies have suggested an enhanced role for stem priming even in the absence of a morphological relationship in German adult readers (Smolka, Libben, & Dressler, Citation2019; see also Smolka, Gondan, & Rösler, Citation2015; Smolka, Komlósi, & Rösler, Citation2009).
2. Note that for nonword targets, it is assumed that nonword stems – if anything at all – should facilitate target rejection.
3. The main analysis was also carried out with lower thresholds for the a-priori RT trimming (5000 ms for grade 2, 4000 ms for grade 3, 3000 ms for grade 4). The original pattern of results was confirmed: we found all predictors and their interactions to be significant, despite the 3-way interaction, exactly as in the analysis with higher thresholds. Also for the post-hoc contrasts, the pattern was comparable.
4. Grade was chosen to be used as a continuous variable rather than a categorical variable because the values of Grade are meaningfully ordered (2 is before 3 is before 4) and grades are continuous in the sense that changes in processing can be assumed to develop gradually from one grade to the other (across all the theoretical time points in-between our actual testing points) rather than happening out of a sudden as soon as children enter the next grade. It is noteworthy, however, that the key findings are the same when treating grade as a categorical predictor. The corresponding analyses are available from the authors upon request.