The Pseudo prefixation Effect in Visual Word Recognition: A True-Neither Strategic Nor Orthographic-Morphemic Effect

Abstract

The question of how word morphology is coded and retrieved during visual word recognition has given rise to a large number of empirical studies. The results, however, do not enable one to decide between alternative models of morphological representation and processing. It is argued in this paper that the contrast between pseudoprefixed words and non-prefixed control words can provide an empirical basis for deciding between hypotheses of morphology representation as sublexical or lexical. This contrast has been used in the three lexical decision experiments reported here, which show that decision times for pseudoprefixed words are significantly slower than for non-prefixed control words. This pseudoprefixation effect strongly supports the hypothesis that morphology is coded and processed sublexically during word recognition. The experimental conditions employed allow both strategic and strictly orthographic explanations for the pseudoprefixation effect to be dismissed.

Lexical Access Routes to Nouns in a Morphologically Rich Language

“…Even though pseudoinflection had no effects on lexical access, another form of pseudoaffixation, pseudoprefixation, has been shown to affect word recognition (Lima, 1987;Pillon, 1998;Smith & Sterling, 1982;Taft, 1981). Unfortunately, there are too few true prefixes to enable a pseudoprefixation experiment in Finnish.…”

“…However, Taft (1981) demonstrated the pseudoprefixation effect in a word naming task when nonwords were eliminated. In addition, the effect has been observed in letter cancellation (Smith & Sterling, 1982), eye movements during sentence reading (with pseudoprefixed words eliciting longer first fixations than truly prefixed words; Lima, 1987), and in a recent lexical decision study with controls for strategic and orthographic effects (Pillon, 1998). A second line of criticism comes from lexical statistics.…”

Morpheme Units in Speech Production: Evidence from Laboratory-induced Verbal Slips

“…2 See Butterworth (1979Butterworth ( , 1983, Bybee and Slobin (1982), and Garrett (1980Garrett ( , 1982 for naturally occurring speech error data regarding the involvement of in ectional morphology in speech production processes. For experimental data, see Bybee and Slobin (1982), MacKay (1976), and Stemberger and MacWhinney (1986). 1992; Pillon, 1993Pillon, , 1998; but see Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989 for a challenging view). The evidence is, however, much less clear as regards the involvement of word morphology in oral speech production processes, especially derivational morphology, on which this article will focus.…”

Orthographic–phonological links in the lexicon: When lexical and sublexical information conflict

“…Perhaps the syllable/morpheme only assumes importance as a sublexical unit when it forms a physically discrete graphemic unit. Such an idea, however, is not supported by the fact that the bulk of research which favors morphemic and/or syllabic processing is based on alphabetic scripts, like English, where there is no such physical structuring of the word (e.g, Burani, Salmaso & Caramazza, 1984;Fowler, Napps & Feldman, 1985;Pillon, 1998;Taft, 1979Taft, , 1981Taft & Forster, 1975). It may well be the case that the syllable assumes greater importance in a script like Korean than one like English (whereas the body may assume greater importance in English than Korean), but this does not mean that fundamentally different processing mechanisms are involved in the different languages: It may simply reflect the nature of the sublexical units that are relevant to processing that particular script.…”