Morphological and orthographic similarity in visual word recognition.

Abstract

The differential impact of orthographic and morphological relatedness on visual word recognition was investigated in a series of priming experiments in Dutch and German. With lexical decision and naming tasks, repetition priming and contiguous priming procedures, and masked and unmasked prime presentation, a pattern of results emerged with qualitative differences between the effects of morphological and form relatedness. With lexical decision, mere orthographic similarity between primes and targets (e.g., keller-KELLER, cellar-ladle) produced negative effects, whereas morphological relatedness (e.g., kellen-KELLE, ladles-ladle) consistently resulted in facilitation. With the naming task, positive priming effects were found for morphological as well as for mere form similarity. On the basis of these results, a model of the lexicon is proposed in which information about word form is represented separately from morphological structure and in which processing at the form level is characterized in terms of activation of, and competition between, form-related entries.

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

“…Earlier studies in English (Feldman & Prostko, 2002;Rastle et al, 2000), French (Seguí & Grainger, 1990), and German (Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995) have consistently shown that form-priming effects dissipate at prime exposure durations exceeding 300 ms. In contrast, Experiment 1 in the present research provides clear evidence of form priming in Hindi, despite the use of relatively long prime exposures (136 and 680 ms).…”

ERP Evidence of Morphological Analysis from Orthography: A Masked Priming Study

“…Morphological decomposition is supported by numerous studies showing that words derived from high-frequency stems are recognized more quickly than words derived from low-frequency stems (e.g., measured as lexical decision times, Schreuder & Baayen, 1997;or fixation duration, Niswander, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 2000; see also Taft, 2004, for extensions of this basic morphemic frequency effect). Further evidence comes from the observation that the recognition of a printed target such as DEPART is facilitated when it is preceded by either a derivationally related prime (e.g., departure) or an inflectionally related prime (e.g., departing) more than is expected based on their overlap in form or meaning (e.g., Rastle et al, 2000;Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995;Stolz & Feldman, 1995;Bentin & Feldman, 1990;Stanners, Neiser, Hernon, & Hall, 1979). Finally, support for morphological decomposition comes from studies that distinguish brain event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by the decomposable regular past tense inflection (call-called) from those elicited by the nondecomposable irregular past tense inflection (see-saw) (see Lavric, Pizzagalli, Forstmeier, & Rippon, 2001, for a review).…”

Morphological and semantic effects in visual word recognition: A time-course study

“…Morphological effects in masked priming have been shown in the absence of semantic priming effects in Hebrew (Frost et al, 1997; SOA = 43 ms). They have also been demonstrated in the absence of orthographic priming effects in French (Grainger, Cole, & Segui, 1991; SOA = 64 ms) and in Dutch (Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995; SOA = 66 ms), though Masson and Isaak (1999) failed to nd such effects when they examined priming of irregular in ectional morphology (kept/keep) in English using the naming task. One aim of the research reported here, then, was to determine whether effects of derivational morphology are obtained in English masked priming in the absence of priming effects for semantically and orthographically related items.…”

“…The long-lag priming paradigm, in which prime and target are separated by a number of intervening items, provides such a condition. Using this paradigm, morphological priming effects have been found in the absence of semantic priming effects in Hebrew (Bentin & Feldman, 1990) and in the absence of orthographic priming effects in German (Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995) and English (Stolz & Feldman, 1995).…”