Morphological priming during reading: Evidence from eye movements

Abstract

We report an eye movement experiment that investigated whether prior exposure to morphologically related and unrelated primes influenced processing of a target word that appeared later in the same sentence. Prime-target pairs had a semantically transparent (e.g., marshy-marsh) or only an apparent morphological relationship (e.g., secretary-secret), or were morphologically unrelated but overlapped in orthography (e.g., extract-extra). Reading times for target words revealed facilitation effects in measures of both early and late processing only for targets that followed semantically transparent morphological primes, providing evidence of semantically mediated priming between words read normally in a sentence. In addition, an increase in target word skipping and in regressions from a posttarget region when targets followed primes rather than control words, regardless of the morphological relationship between the words, suggests that prime-target orthographic overlap influences parafoveal processing of target words. We discuss our findings in relation to morphological priming during isolated word recognition and the process of lexical identification during reading.

Keywords:

• Eye movements during reading
• Word recognition
• Morphological decomposition
• Morpho-orthographic processing
• Masked priming
• Unmasked priming

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Raymond Bertram, Keith Rayner, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

¹Further analyses were conducted to determine if regressions were made back to the prime word. There were negligible differences in the frequency of regressions in prime and control word conditions in either semantically transparent (19.9% vs. 19.6%), apparent (28.1% vs. 24.7%), or morphologically related conditions (25.4% vs. 26.7%), and neither the main effect of prime type nor the interaction of prime type and morphological relationship was statistically reliable (Fs < 1).