Letter transpositions within and across morphemic boundaries: Is there a cross-language difference?

Abstract

Research on the impact of letter transpositions that arise across morpheme boundaries has yielded conflicting results. These results have led to the suggestion that a crosslinguistic difference may exist in the recognition of Spanish and English words. In two masked-priming experiments run on separate groups of Spanish and English speakers, we tested this hypothesis by comparing the impacts of primes with letter transpositions that arose within morphemes or across morpheme boundaries on the recognition of identical or nearidentical Spanish-English cognate targets. The results showed transposed-letter benefits in both Spanish and English that were not modulated by the position of the transposed letter in the prime stimulus. Our findings therefore add to the growing body of literature suggesting that the transposed-letter benefit is not affected by the position of the transposed letters relative to the morpheme boundary, and they dispel previous suggestions that there might be a genuine difference in orthographic coding across the Spanish and English writing systems.Keywords Visual word recognition . Orthography . Masked primingThe recognition of a printed word such as pot requires the analysis of letter identity (p, o, t) as well as of letter order (that the p goes before both the o and the t). In the absence of an analysis of letter order in the word recognition process, readers would be unable to detect the difference between anagram stimuli such as pot, opt, and top, which share the same letters, but in different configurations. Yet, despite the importance of letter order for disambiguating similar words, recent research has shown that letter position coding is surprisingly imprecise (see Davis, 2005;Grainger, 2008).

Not Everybody Sees the Ness in the Darkness: Individual Differences in Masked Suffix Priming

“…Duñabeitia et al ( 2007 ) replicated previous findings of transposed letter (TL) priming effects for polymorphemic words ( vio il nist-VIOLINIST ; see Christianson et al, 2005 ), and showed that the priming effect disappeared when the transposition was inserted between two morphemes (e.g., violi in st-VIOLINIST vs. violi er st-VIOLINIST ). In contrast, Sánchez-Gutiérrez and Rastle ( 2013 ) did not find any difference in the magnitude of the TL effects when transposing letters within and between morphemes in a masked priming experiment, in line with other similar studies (e.g., Rueckl and Rimzhim, 2011 ; Beyersmann et al, 2012 ; Masserang and Pollatsek, 2012 ; Beyersmann et al, 2013 ). Following Andrews and Lo ( 2013 ), Duñabeitia et al ( 2014 ) decided to investigate whether individual differences in orthographic processing could be responsible for this apparent inconsistency.…”

Do morphemes matter when reading compound words with transposed letters? Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials

“…They found significant facilitation following both within- and across-morpheme TL primes relative to the replacement letter control. Several recent studies have found similar results of equal within- and across-morpheme TL priming in both English (Beyersmann, Coltheart, & Castles, 2012; Beyersmann, McCormick, & Rastle, 2013; Diependaele et al, 2013) and Spanish (Sánchez-Gutiérrez & Rastle, 2013). Finally, Perea and Carrieras (2006) found significant TL versus RL priming across a morpheme boundary in Basque compound words.…”

Revisiting letter transpositions within and across morphemic boundaries

“…2, the within-and between-morpheme TL 1 As can be seen in Table 2, the two RL conditions led to significantly different RTs (shorter RTs for between-morpheme RL than for withinmorpheme RL). This difference is similar to that observed by Sánchez-Gutiérrez and Rastle (2013) in their suffixed sets of Spanish and English words (8 and 7 ms, respectively), and a similar difference was found by these authors in the error rates. Similarly, Duñabeitia et al (2007) also found a difference of 9 ms between these conditions.…”

“…3;Duñabeitia et al, 2007; see also Luke & Christianson, 2013, for additional evidence), and support a claim for the existence, at least for the most skilled readers, of an early stage of morphological decomposition that is sensitive to morpho-orthographic interactions (see also Taft & Nillsen, 2013). More importantly, the present study offers an (admittedly speculative, but suggestive) explanation for the different results that have been provided in recent studies on the same issue (see Beyersmann et al, 2013;Rueckl & Rimzhim, 2011;Sánchez-Gutiérrez & Rastle, 2013).…”