Research article summary (published 30 Jul 2009):

Early morphological processing is morphosemantic and not simply morpho-orthographic: a violation of form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition.

Full Abstract

Many studies have suggested that a word's orthographic form must be processed before its meaning becomes available. Some interpret the (null) finding of equal facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes in early stages of morphological processing as consistent with this view. Recent literature suggests that morphological facilitation tends to be greater after transparent than after opaque primes, however. To determine whether the degree of semantic transparency influences parsing into a stem and a suffix (morphological decomposition) in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared patterns of facilitation between semantically transparent (e.g., coolant-cool) and opaque (e.g., rampant-ramp) prime-target pairs. Form properties of the stem (frequency, neighborhood size, and prime-target letter overlap), as well as related-unrelated and transparent-opaque affixes, were matched. Morphological facilitation was significantly greater for semantically transparent pairs than for opaque pairs. Ratings of prime-target relatedness predicted the magnitude of facilitation. The results limit the scope of form-then-meaning models of word recognition and demonstrate that semantic similarity can influence even early stages of morphological processing.

Author information

Author/s: Feldman, Laurie Beth (LB); O'Connor, Patrick A (PA); Del Prado Martín, Fermín Moscoso (FM);

Affiliation: University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, New York, USA. lf503(-atsign-)albany.edu

Grants: HD-01994 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

Journal: Psychonomic bulletin & review (Psychon Bull Rev), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Aug; vol 16 (issue 4) : pp 684-91

Dates: Created 2009/08/03; Completed 2009/10/13;

PMID: 19648453, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 10/13/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Attention Comprehension Concept Formation Decision Making Humans Paired-Associate Learning

Paired-Associate Learning Phonetics Psycholinguistics Reaction Time Reading Semantics

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