Constituent priming effects: Evidence for preserved morphological processing in healthy old readers

Abstract

How elderly adults process morphologically complex words is still a matter of controversy. The present study explored whether compound word recognition is affected by ageing. A group of young adults and a group of older healthy adults were tested on a lexical decision task. Compound words were presented primed by their first constituent (book-BOOKSHOP), their second constituent (shop-BOOKSHOP), or by an unrelated word (house-BOOKSHOP). Results revealed that morphological processing is fully preserved in advanced age and that the magnitude of the constituent priming effect was similar for young and older adults.

Keywords:

• Compound words
• Morphological priming
• Ageing

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article has been partially supported by Grants SEJ2004-07680-C02-02/PSIC, SEJ2006-09238/PSIC, and SEJ2005-05205/EDU from the Spanish Government, and by Grant BFI05.310 from the Basque Government. The authors thank Lars-Göran Nilsson and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. Thanks are also due to Margaret Gillon-Dowens for her support and priceless patience.

Notes

¹Even though on a priori grounds one could argue that the three standard deviation cutoff might leave a high number of outlier values in the data (e.g., see Ratcliff, 1993), it should be noted that the data trimming procedure did not have any significant impact on the results. An analysis of the same data with a two standard deviation cutoff produced exactly the same results, with almost identical p-values for the observed effects.

²Interestingly, all the previous studies on constituent priming effects in healthy young adults have stated that their results confirmed early morphological decomposition of the compound words (e.g., the lexeme book is rapidly identified and processed when a reader encounters the word BOOKSHOP). However, it could be thought that the difference in the priming effect obtained from book-BOOKSHOP and the unrelated pair house-BOOKSHOP may reflect a mere form-based orthographic priming effect. Evidence against this assumption has recently been provided by Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, and Carreiras (in press-b). Duñabeitia and colleagues showed that constituent priming effects like those from book-BOOKSHOP are largely different from orthographic priming effects such as those in pairs like resta-RESTAURANT. Further research is needed to test the same subjects with orthographically, morphologically, and semantically related prime-target pairs to test this issue.