Do morphemes matter when reading compound words with transposed letters? Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials

ABSTRACT

The current study investigates the online processing consequences of encountering compound words with transposed letters (TLs), to determine if cross-morpheme TLs are more disruptive to reading than those within a single morpheme, as would be predicted by accounts of obligatory morpho-orthopgrahic decomposition. Two measures of online processing, eye movements and event-related potentials (ERPs), were collected in separate experiments. Participants read sentences containing correctly spelled compound words (cupcake), or compounds with TLs occurring either across morphemes (cucpake) or within one morpheme (cupacke). Results showed that between- and within-morpheme transpositions produced equal processing costs in both measures, in the form of longer reading times (Experiment 1) and a late posterior positivity (Experiment 2) that did not differ between conditions. Findings converge to suggest that within- and between-morpheme TLs are equally disruptive to recognition, providing evidence against obligatory morpho-orthographic processing and in favour of whole-word access of English compound words during sentence reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye movements
• ERPs
• compound words
• morphological processing
• LPC/P600

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank S. Brown-Schmidt, S. Garnsey, C. Fisher, and D. Watson for helpful discussion of this work, S. Luke for assistance with the preparation of the eye-tracking portion of the experiment, and Y. Kudaimi, H. Mellish, T. Panova, and M. Wu for help with ERP data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It should be noted that the pattern of effects observed in the model outcomes did not differ for these final models and those seen in intercepts-only models created for each reading time measure.

2. ERPs were also measured in two earlier time windows: the N250 time window (200–300 ms post-stimulus onset), in which previous studies have found effects of masked TL primes (e.g. Duñabeitia et al., 2009), as well as the P2 time window (150–250 ms). Repeated measures ANOVAs conducted over all 26 scalp electrodes comparing the TL-between, TL-within, and control compound word conditions found no effect of spelling condition (N250: F(2,40) = 0.23, p = .79; P2: F(2,40) = 0.20, p = .82) nor interaction with electrode (N250: F(50,1000) = 0.61, p = .65; P2: F(50,1000) = 1.16, p = .33). These results indicate that early perceptual processes were also unaffected by the between- versus within-morpheme TL manipulation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award and NIH [grant number AG026308] to Kara D. Federmeier, as well as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to Mallory C. Stites.