Priming effects in the recognition of simple and complex words and pseudowords

Abstract

Whether morphological processing of complex words occurs beyond orthographic processing is a matter of intense debate. In this study, morphological processing is examined by presenting complex words (brujería -> brujo –witchcraft -> witch), as well as simple (brujaña->brujo) and complex pseudowords (brujanza ->brujo), as primes in three masked lexical decision tasks. In the first experiment, the three experimental conditions facilitated word recognition in comparison to the control condition, but no differences emerged between them. Given the importance of the surface frequency effect observed, a second experiment was conducted. The results fully replicate those observed in the first one, but this time with low frequency targets. In the third experiment, vowels were removed from the stems of primes to reduce the orthographic overlap between primes and targets and, therefore, the influence of the embedded stem effect. The results show facilitative effects only for complex words. However, paired comparisons show no differences between experimental conditions. The overall results show the central role played by the processing of stems in visual word recognition and are explained in terms of current models of morphological processing.

Morphological processing of complex and simple pseudo-words in adults and older adults

“…However, the evidence of complex pseudo-words activating their stems is limited and is restricted to priming studies (e.g., Hasenäcker, Beyersman, & Schroeder, 2016; Morris et al, 2010; Longtin & Meunier, 2005). In the case of complex pseudo-words, lexical activation cannot be suggested, since pseudo-words are not represented at this level, so the explanation seems to be more reasonable in terms of orthographic or morphological activation at the sublexical (e.g., Lázaro, Illera, & Sainz, 2018) or lemma level (Taft & Nguyen-Hoan, 2010). For instance, in the lemma level, Taft & Nguyen-Hoan (2010) found that the orthographic processing of the input, word, or pseudo-word detects the letters that constitute stems and derivational suffixes.…”

Pupillary Responses to Pseudowords With Different Morphological and Imageability Features

“…We created three groups of 40 pseudowords each. These groups included polymorphemic pseudowords – pseudowords in which both a stem and a suffix exist as in “footbalist,” suffixed pseudowords – pseudowords in which a real derivational suffix is attached to a non-existing base as in “smopify,” and simple pseudowords – with no stems or suffixes as in “gresmor.” The three lists of pseudowords are matched by first syllable frequency – we matched the pseudowords one by one ensuring that the same first syllable is used to create one pseudoword per condition (see Ferrand et al, 1996), letter length (see e.g., Hudson & Bergman, 1985), and the number of orthographic neighbors – by using the database of Alameda and Cuetos (1995) (e.g., Perea & Pollatsek, 1998); the suffixed and polymorphemic pseudowords are also matched by suffix frequency by pairing the suffixes employed one by one (see for instance Lázaro et al, 2015). The imageability of the pseudowords was scored by 20 university students (16 females, M age = 23, SD = 2.20) through a 7-point Likert scale.…”

Las tareas conductuales en la investigación sobre el procesamiento del lenguaje

“…Esto ocurre así en el llamado priming de repetición (casa-casa) cuando hay semejanza ortográfica entre los estímulos inductor y diana (caso-casa) y también cuando ambos guardan una relación morfológica (entiendo-entender) o semántica (marido-mujer) (Forster y Davis 1984; Perea y Gotor 1997;Forster 1998;Sánchez-Casas et al 2003). En cambio, cuando el estímulo inductor es una pseudopalabra (cusa-casa), el efecto de facilitación se desvanece (Lázaro et al 2018) o incluso se hace inhibitorio, es decir, provoca un en enlentecimiento de la respuesta y un mayor porcentaje de errores (Mathey et al 2013).…”