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Research on visual word identification has extensively investigated the role of morphemes, recurrent letter chunks that convey a fairly regular meaning (e.g.,lead-er-ship). Masked priming studies highlighted morpheme identification in complex (e.g., sing-er) and pseudo-complex (corn-er) words, as well as in nonwords (e.g., basket-y). The present study investigated whether such sensitivity to morphemes could be rooted in the visual system sensitivity to statistics of letter (co)occurrence. To this aim, we assessed masked priming as induced by nonword primes obtained by combining a stem (e.g.,bulb) with (i) naturally frequent, derivational suffixes (e.g.,-ment), (ii) non-morphological, equally frequent word endings (e.g.,-idge), and (iii) non-morphological, infrequent word endings (e.g.,-kle). In two additional tasks, we collected interpretability and word-likeness measures for morphologically-structured nonwords, to assess whether priming is modulated by such factors. Results indicate that masked priming is not affected by either the frequency or the morphological status of word endings. Our findings are in line with models of early visual processing based on automatic stem/word extraction, and rule out letter chunk frequency as a main player in the early stages of visual word identification. Nonword interpretability and word-likeness do not affect this pattern.

Reading requires the successful encoding of letter identity and position within a visual display, a process that relies on both visual and linguistic resources. In a series of experiments, we investigate whether readers’ lifelong experience with letter co-occurrence regularities supports letter processing. Skilled readers were briefly exposed to strings of five consonants; critically, letters in position 2 and 4 were embedded in either high (B in MBL) or low (PBG) transitional probability (TP) triplets. When presented with two strings differing by the critical letter (e.g., MBLSD vs. MCLSD), participants correctly identified the right option more often in high-TP than low-TP contexts, regardless of position. Experiment II featured both a Same-Different and a Reicher-Wheeler task with response time constraints, and further qualified the contextual facilitation effect, with high-TP eliciting faster ‘same’ judgements only for letters in position 2. In a third experiment, context had no effect on Same-Different matchings with strings of pseudo-characters sharing letter low-level visual features. Our results indicate that co-occurrence statistics affect letter recognition in tasks that emphasize whole-string processing. This effect is genuinely orthographic, as it is conditional on intact letter identities, and with increasing task demands it only surfaces for letters close to word onset.

Research on visual word identification has extensively investigated the role of morphemes, recurrent letter chunks that convey a fairly regular meaning (e.g., lead-er-ship). Masked priming studies highlighted morpheme identification in complex (e.g., sing-er) and pseudo-complex (corn-er) words, as well as in nonwords (e.g., basket-y). The present study investigated whether such sensitivity to morphemes could be rooted in the visual system sensitivity to statistics of letter (co)occurrence. To this aim, we assessed masked priming as induced by nonword primes obtained by combining a stem (e.g., bulb) with (i) naturally frequent, derivational suffixes (e.g., -ment), (ii) non-morphological, equally frequent word-endings (e.g., -idge), and (iii) non-morphological, infrequent word-endings (e.g., -kle). In two additional tasks, we collected interpretability and word-likeness measures for morphologically-structured nonwords, to assess whether priming is modulated by such factors. Results indicate that masked priming is not affected by either the frequency or the morphological status of word-endings, a pattern that was replicated in a second experiment including also lexical primes. Our findings are in line with models of early visual processing based on automatic stem/word extraction, and rule out letter chunk frequency as a main player in the early stages of visual word identification. Nonword interpretability and word-likeness do not affect this pattern.