Masked cross-modal morphological priming: Unravelling morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic influences in early word recognition

Abstract

Two experiments examined priming from semantically transparent and opaque suffix-derivations (including pseudo-derived words such as corner), using the masked cross-modal priming technique. Experiment 1 showed that in a Dutch lexical decision task, latencies to root targets were facilitated when visually presented primes were transparent derivations of the target, regardless of whether targets were presented visually or auditorily. Pseudo-derivations only provided weak evidence for priming and only when targets were presented visually. In Experiment 2 we tested transparent and opaque priming more thoroughly in a French lexical decision task by using the incremental priming technique in combination with a psychophysical approach. The results showed that opaque as well as transparent derivations facilitated the visual and auditory processing of their (pseudo-) root. However, transparent priming occurred earlier than opaque priming in the visual modality. Moreover, when facilitation from opaque derivations appeared in the visual modality, transparent derivations produced a larger facilitation effect. We argue that our findings illustrate the existence of two distinct processing systems underlying early morphological processing: a morpho-orthographic system and a morpho-semantic system.

Acknowledgments

Kevin Diependaele was supported by a research grant of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders. The authors would like to thank Ram Frost, Cristina Burani and Len Katz for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹We thank Cristina Burani for pointing out such potential problems.

²We included both word types since there is no theoretical reason to distinguish these word types from each other in the present context (see Rastle et al., 2000, Rastle and Davis, 2003, Rastle et al., in press, for a similar approach). As stated in the introduction, both types can be considered as semantically opaque (i.e., their meaning is not predictable from the meaning of their constituent morphemes). The amount of pseudo-derived items was higher in this condition, since we could not select an equal number of both types that met the specific demands of our selection procedure.

³Note that the word items used in Experiment 2 were largely identical to those tested in the study by Longtin et al. (2003).