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

Abstract

Some theories of visual word recognition postulate that there is a level of processing or representation at which morphemes are treated differently from whole words. Support for these theories has been derived from priming experiments in which the recognition of a target word is facilitated by the prior presentation of a morphologicallyrelated prime (departure-DEPART). In English, such facilitation could be due to morphological relatedness, or to some combination of the orthographic and semantic relatedness characteristic of derivationally related words. We report two sets of visual priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions (43 ms, 72 ms, and 230 ms). Results showed that morphological structure plays a signi cant role in the early visual recognition of English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic relatedness. Findings are discussed in terms of current approaches to morphological processing.Requests for reprints should be addressed to Kathleen Rastle,

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).…”

“…Furthermore, previous research on form priming provides three distinct lines of evidence that also argue against the possibility that our findings for Urdu are attributable to the lower orthographic overlap in the stimuli. Firstly, research on several alphabetic languages, including Dutch, English, French and German, indicates that primes sharing orthographic but not phonological overlap, for instance axle-able, tend to inhibit rather than facilitate target recognition, especially when the prime is exposed long enough to be consciously perceived (Davis & Lupker, 2006;de Moor & Brysbaert, 2000;Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995;Ferrand & Grainger, 1993, 1994Grainger & Ferrand, 1996;Rastle, Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Tyler, 2000;Seguí & Grainger, 1990). Secondly, studies across languages show that when the degree of orthographic overlap is controlled, primes with greater phonological overlap produce larger facilitation effects; for example, conal primes canal better than does cinal (Drieghe & Brysbaert, 2002;Perfetti & Bell, 1991;Pollatsek, Perea, & Carreiras, 2005).…”

Early dynamics of the semantic priming shift

“…With a single prime, the amount of activation received by a target is reported in the literature as increasing with the strength of its association to a related prime (Abernethy & Coney, 1993;Coney, 2002;Frishkoff, 2007;Hutchinson, Whitman, Abeare, & Raiter, 2003) and with the prime-target SOA (Coney, 2002;Rastle et al, 2000; for reviews, see Brunel & Lavigne, 2009;Chiarello, Liu, Shears, Quan, & Kacinik, 2003). A recent experimental study has revealed that the slow dynamics of the priming shift in the long SOA range depend on the strength of the association between the target and its related prime (Lavigne, Dumercy, Chanquoy, Mercier, & Vitu, 2012).…”

“…Interference is reported in the experimental literature to affect semantic priming (Deacon, Uhm, Ritter, Hewitt, & Dynowska, 1999;Hutchison, Neely, & Johnson, 2001;Neely, 1976Neely, , 1977Neely, , 1991Neely, Keefe, & Ross, 1989;Rastle, Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Tyler, 2000).…”

“…Experiment 1 suggests for the first time that UR priming, though being very reliable in the literature, is not ubiquitous at all SOAs for weak associates. When no other word is interposed between the related prime and target (as is the case in UR priming), single priming from one strongly associated prime arises at very short SOAs of a few tens of milliseconds (Perea & Gotor, 1997;Perea & Rosa, 2002;Rastle et al, 2000). The non-significant UR priming of weak associates in the current Experiment is then a new result, to be related to the slower activation of weak compared to strong associates in single priming (Coney, 2002) and/or to the proactive interference generated by the first prime unrelated to the UR target in multiple priming (Lavigne et al, 2011).…”