Morphological processing during visual word recognition in developing readers: Evidence from masked priming

Abstract

Masked priming studies with adult readers have provided evidence for a form-based morpho-orthographic segmentation mechanism that “blindly” decomposes any word with the appearance of morphological complexity. The present studies investigated whether evidence for structural morphological decomposition can be obtained with developing readers. We used a masked primed lexical decision design first adopted by Rastle, Davis, and New (2004), comparing truly suffixed (golden–GOLD) and pseudosuffixed (mother–MOTH) prime–target pairs with nonsuffixed controls (spinach–SPIN). Experiment 1 tested adult readers, showing that priming from both pseudo- and truly suffixed primes could be obtained using our own set of high-frequency word materials. Experiment 2 assessed a group of Year 3 and Year 5 children, but priming only occurred when prime and target shared a true morphological relationship, and not when the relationship was pseudomorphological. This pattern of results indicates that morpho-orthographic decomposition mechanisms do not become automatized until a relatively late stage in reading development.

Keywords:

• Visual word recognition
• Masked priming
• Morphological decomposition
• Reading development

Acknowledgments

This paper was prepared while Elisabeth Beyersmann was supported by an International Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES). We would like to thank Thushara Anandakumar for her help with recruiting and testing participants.

Notes

¹ To confirm the present findings, we performed analyses of variance (ANOVAs) of the latency data, by subject (collapsed across item data, reported as F ₁) and by item (collapsed across subject data, reported as F ₂), with the two factors item type (truly suffixed vs. pseudosuffixed vs. nonsuffixed) and prime type (related vs. unrelated). The analysis revealed a main effect of item type, which was significant in the subject data, F ₁(2, 40) = 10.67, p < .001, but not in the item data, F ₂(2, 27) = 1.60, p = .222. There was a significant interaction of item type with prime type, F ₁(2, 40) = 15.86, p < .001, and F ₂(2, 27) = 15.70, p < .001, and a significant main effect of prime type, F ₁(1, 41) = 7.10, p = .011, F ₂(1, 28) = 10.84, p = .003. Note that we also carried out a set of median analyses, which confirmed the pattern of results observed in the ANOVAs.

² Although the study solely tested girls, we had no reason to expect any sex differences in a basic word recognition experiment such as this.

³ To confirm the present results, we performed ANOVAs of the latency data, by subject and by item, with the three factors item type (truly suffixed vs. pseudosuffixed vs. nonsuffixed), prime type (related vs. unrelated), and age group (Year 3 vs. Year 5). The analysis revealed a significant main effect of item type, F ₁(2, 86) = 11.95, p < .001, and F ₂(2, 29) = 4.41, p = .021, and a significant interaction of item type with prime type, F ₁(2, 86) = 6.94, p = .002, and F ₂(2, 29) = 4.70, p = .017. Moreover, there was a significant main effect of age group, F ₁(1, 87) = 44.91, p < .001. Finally, we carried out a set of median analyses confirming the pattern of results observed in the ANOVAs.