A recently accepted paper in LANGUAGE & COGNITIVE PROCESSES

Authors: Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Sachiko Kinoshita, Manuel Carreiras, & Dennis Norris.

Title: Is morpho-orthographic decomposition purely orthographic? Evidence from masked priming in the same-different task

Abstract: Two experiments used the cross-case same-different task to test whether the orthographically driven morphological decomposition effects that have been found in the lexical decision task are obligatory. Experiment 1 replicated the manipulation used by Duñabeitia, Perea, and Carreiras (2007), testing transposed-letter priming effects spanning the boundary between the affix and the stem. In contrast to their finding observed with the lexical decision task, transposed-letter priming effect did not vanish with polymorphemic or pseudomorphemic words. Experiment 2 used the manipulation used by Rastle, Davis, and New (2004), comparing the effects of polymorphemic affixed words (e.g., walker), pseudo-affixed words (e.g., corner), and non-affixed monomorphemic words (e.g., brothel) in target word recognition. Unlike the results observed in the original lexical decision study, equal priming effects were observed with all three types of words. These results suggest that the presence of an orthographically defined subunit (affix) is not sufficient to drive morphological decomposition processes.


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