Differences in the Processing of Prefixes and Suffixes Revealed by a Letter-Search Task

Abstract

A letter-search task was used to test the hypothesis that affixes are chunked during morphological processing and that such chunking might operate differently for prefixes and suffixes. Participants had to detect a letter target that was embedded either in a prefix or suffix (e.g., ‘R’ in propoint or filmure) or in a non-prefix beginning or non-suffix ending (e.g., ‘R’ in cropoint or filmire). Prefixed and suffixed letter-strings comprised real stems and affixes but never formed a real word. Effects of letter cluster frequency were also investigated by manipulating the frequency of non-affix beginnings and endings. Letter search took longer in suffixes compared with non-suffix endings but not for prefixes compared with non-prefix beginnings. Moreover, performance was not affected by letter cluster frequency. We interpret our findings in the light of recent accounts of morpho-orthographic segmentation and the different function of prefixes and suffixes.

Notes

¹ The letter search literature employs the term “unitization” rather than “chunking.” Although other explanations have been proposed to account for how unitization of the whole can hinder perception of the parts, it is clear that the chunking operation is one good candidate here. For simplicity we therefore equate unitization with chunking in the present work.

² Four items were transposed-letter versions of a real word (fautuer, coupuer, lourduer, longuer) and excluded from the analyses post hoc, revealing that our key findings remained unchanged and most important, the interaction between status and position was still significant (t = 2.06, p = .040).