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ABSTRACT
Does the processing of words with a transparent morphological structure benefit from this structure? Here we show that the flankers task provides an interesting novel angle on this well-researched issue. Participants saw transparent suffixed target words flanked by their stem (e.g. farm farmer farm), as well as pseudo-suffixed words and non-suffixed words flanked by their embedded word (e.g. corn corner corn; cash cashew cash). Targets were also tested with unrelated word flankers (e.g. book farmer book), and participants made lexical decisions to the central targets. We predicted that truly suffixed word identification would be facilitated by the presence of stem flankers over and above any purely orthographic effects that were expected to be revealed in the pseudo-morphological and non-morphological conditions. We found exactly that pattern and conclude that parallel processing of distinct word identities in the flankers task is modulated by the transparent morphological relations between these words.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We note the early investigation of Bradshaw (Citation1974) using the flankers task to study semantic processing.
2 That is, the opposite arrangement of primes and targets compared with the majority of masked morphological priming investigations.
3 Stimuli, data, and scripts used for data analysis are available at: https://osf.io/c26vq/.
4 Note that the study of Snell and Grainger (Citation2018) manipulated flanker orthographic relatedness, which was also manipulated in the present study. To our knowledge, no previous study has manipulated the morphological relatedness of flankers.
5 We note nevertheless that the greater flanker effects observed in the truly morphological condition were driven mainly by an increase in RTs with unrelated flankers. Given that it is impossible to control for all potential differences across different sets of target words, the key comparison here is between the related and unrelated flanker conditions tested with the same target words.
6 We interpret better performance in the related flanker vs. the unrelated flanker conditions as facilitation, while acknowledging that unrelated flankers are known to interfere with target word processing compared with a no-flanker condition (Snell & Grainger, Citation2018). It might therefore be more appropriate to refer to these effects as “reduced interference”. We maintain the term “facilitation” in order to have comparable terminology with the priming literature.