Title: Early morphological decomposition of suffixed words: Masked priming evidence with transposed-letter nonword primes.
Abstract:
Many studies have previously reported that the recognition of a stem target (e.g. teach) is facilitated by the prior masked presentation of a prime consisting of a derived form of it (e.g. teacher). We conducted two lexical decision experiments to investigate masked morphological priming in Spanish. Experiment 1 showed that equal magnitudes of masked stem-target priming are obtained for both morphologically complex word primes (e.g. doloroso-DOLOR [painful-PAIN]) and morphologically complex nonword primes that included letter transpositions within the stem (e.g. dlooroso-DOLOR). Experiment 2 used morphologically complex nonword primes comprising lexically illegal combinations of stems and suffixes (e.g. total + ito [a little total]). Priming was obtained for morphologically related nonword primes (e.g. totalito-TOTAL), but not for nonword primes that included letter transpositions within the pseudo-stem (e.g. ttoalito-TOTAL). Our data suggest that morpho-orthographic parsing mechanisms benefit from semantic constraints at early stages in the reading system, which we discuss in the context of current morphological processing accounts.
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