Orthographic and semantic opacity in masked and delayed priming: Evidence from Greek

Abstract

Research using the masked priming paradigm has suggested that there is a form of morphological decomposition that is robust to orthographic alterations, even when the words are not semantically related (e.g., badger/badge). In contrast, delayed priming is influenced by semantic relatedness but it is not clear whether it can survive orthographic changes. In this paper, we ask whether morpho-orthographic segmentation breaks down in the presence of the extensive orthographic changes found in Greek morphology (orthographic opacity). The effects of semantic relatedness and orthographic opacity are examined in masked (Experiment 1) and delayed priming (Experiment 2). Significant masked priming was observed for pairs that shared orthography, irrespective of whether they shared meaning (mania/mana, “mania/mother”). Delayed priming was observed for pairs that were semantically related, irrespective of orthographic opacity (poto/pino, “drink/I drink”). The results are discussed in terms of theories of morphological processing in visual word recognition.

Keywords:

• Morphology
• Visual word recognition
• Masked priming
• Delayed priming
• Greek

Acknowledgements

The research was funded by a research grant to Eleni Orfanidou from the Maria and Pantelis Laimos Foundation. Preliminary results were presented at the 6th Morphological Processing Conference, Turku, Finland, 14–17 June 2009 and the 9th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, Chicago, USA, 29–31 October 2009.

We thank Dr Argiro Vatakis at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing/R.I “Athena” for her help in recruiting and testing participants. We also wish to thank Dr Athanassios Protopappas for extracting information on the stimuli from the ILSP PsychoLinguistic Resource (IPLR).

Notes

¹In Greek it is possible to say that there are very few words that are related (strongly) in meaning but not in morphology (except of course for synonyms). However, one should be cautious in making this statement as it is possible that the different diachronic developments of the Greek language can give the appearance of morphological relatedness to words that are only related in meaning. One example could be a pair like (potamos/pino, “river/I drink”), where potamos is not actually morphologically related to pino but to the ancient Greek verb , pipto, “I fall”, in modern Greek) (as verified by the Dictionary of Modern Greek, Babiniotis, 2006). We should note though that the semantic relationship between poto/pino (a pair used in the +S/M, –O condition) is intuitively stronger than the one in potamos/pipto.

²In the examples, the Greek word is first written in the modern Greek alphabet, followed by the Latin transliteration in italics and lastly by the English translation between quotation marks. The transliteration is according to the transliteration system of Greek into Latin adopted by the United Nations and ELOT (ISO 843-743) (Hellenic Organisation for Standardisation). The hyphen separates the stem from the inflectional and derivational affixes. In addition, all pairs are written in low case to reflect the way they were presented in the experiments (both prime and target in low case in order to preserve the stress marker) instead of the widely used convention of low case for prime and upper case for target. The second word in the pair is the target and the first word is the prime.