Decomposition in a non-concatenated morphological structure involves more than just the roots: Evidence from fast priming

Complex words in Hebrew are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: a consonantal root embedded in a nominal or verbal word-pattern morpho-phonological unit made up of vowels or vowels and consonants. Research on written-word recognition has revealed a robust effect of the roots and the verbal-patterns, but not of the nominal-patterns, on word recognition. These findings suggest that the Hebrew lexicon is organized and accessed via roots. We explored the hypothesis that the absence of a nominal-pattern effect reflects methodological limitations of the experimental paradigms used in previous studies. Specifically, the potential facilitative effect induced by a shared nominal-pattern was counteracted by an interference effect induced by the competition between the roots of two words derived from different roots but with the same nominal-pattern. In the current study, a fast-priming paradigm for sentence reading and a “delayed-letters” procedure were used to isolate the initial effect of nominal-patterns on lexical access. The results, based on eye-fixation latency, demonstrated a facilitatory effect induced by nominal-pattern primes relative to orthographic control primes when presented for 33 or 42 ms. The results are discussed in relation to the role of the word-pattern as an organizing principle of the Hebrew lexicon, together with the roots.

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Neural Correlates of Morphological Decomposition during Visual Word Recognition

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn.2007.19.12.1983 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 19 (12) ◽

pp. 1983-1993 ◽

Cited By ~ 67

Author(s):

Brian T. Gold ◽

Kathleen Rastle

Keyword(s):

Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽

Magnetic Resonance ◽

Word Recognition ◽

Visual Word Recognition ◽

Morphological Structure ◽

Masked Priming ◽

Visual Word ◽

Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽

Resonance Imaging ◽

Complex Words

Considerable behavioral research has demonstrated that the visual word recognition system is sensitive to morphological structure. It has typically been assumed that analysis of morphologically complex words occurs only when the meaning of these words can be derived from the meanings of their constituents (e.g., hunter = hunt + er). However, results from recent behavioral research using the masked priming technique have demonstrated that morphological analysis can occur at an earlier orthographic level, in cases in which the meanings of complex words cannot be derived from their constituents (e.g., corner = corn + er). Here, we combine the logic of behavioral masked priming with the neurophysiological phenomenon of functional magnetic resonance imaging priming suppression to look for evidence of nonsemantic morphological priming at the neural level. Both behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging results indicated priming effects associated with the mere appearance of morphological structure (corner—CORN). In addition, these effects were distinguishable from lexical-semantic effects (bucket—PAIL) and orthographic effects (brothel—BROTH). Three left-lateralized occipito-temporal regions showed sensitivity to early morphological components of visual word recognition. Two of these regions also showed orthographic priming (∼BA 37, peak: −48 −60 −17; ∼BA 19, peak: −40 −77 −1), whereas one was sensitive only to morphological similarity between primes and targets (∼BA 19, peak: ∼37 ∼67 ∼7). These findings provide a neurobiological basis for a purely structural morphemic segmentation mechanism operating at early stages of visual word recognition.

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Real-time Functional Architecture of Visual Word Recognition

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_00699 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 246-265 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Caroline Whiting ◽

Yury Shtyrov ◽

William Marslen-Wilson

Keyword(s):

Word Recognition ◽

Real Time ◽

Visual Word Recognition ◽

Morphological Structure ◽

Masked Priming ◽

Time Frame ◽

Visual Word ◽

Functional Architecture ◽

Lexical Meaning ◽

Complex Words

Despite a century of research into visual word recognition, basic questions remain unresolved about the functional architecture of the process that maps visual inputs from orthographic analysis onto lexical form and meaning and about the units of analysis in terms of which these processes are conducted. Here we use magnetoencephalography, supported by a masked priming behavioral study, to address these questions using contrasting sets of simple (walk), complex (swimmer), and pseudo-complex (corner) forms. Early analyses of orthographic structure, detectable in bilateral posterior temporal regions within a 150–230 msec time frame, are shown to segment the visual input into linguistic substrings (words and morphemes) that trigger lexical access in left middle temporal locations from 300 msec. These are primarily feedforward processes and are not initially constrained by lexical-level variables. Lexical constraints become significant from 390 msec, in both simple and complex words, with increased processing of pseudowords and pseudo-complex forms. These results, consistent with morpho-orthographic models based on masked priming data, map out the real-time functional architecture of visual word recognition, establishing basic feedforward processing relationships between orthographic form, morphological structure, and lexical meaning.

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Morphological priming of inflectional suffixes

10.31219/osf.io/s8awx ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Katarina Marjanovic ◽

Davide Crepaldi

Keyword(s):

Priming Effect ◽

Word Identification ◽

Masked Priming ◽

Visual Word ◽

Priming Paradigm ◽

Morphological Priming ◽

Visual Word Identification ◽

The Rich ◽

Complex Words

Morphologically complex words are processed through their constituent morphemes during visual word recognition. While this has been primarily established through the stem priming paradigm, the role of shared affixes is more controversial. Also, most evidence on affix priming comes from derivation, while inflectional priming remains largely unaddressed. Here we present two lexical decision, masked priming experiments filling this gap. Taking advantage of the rich inflectional pattern of Slovene, we assessed inflectional suffix priming (mestam–HALJAM), and compared it to the well-established stem priming effect (haljov–HALJAM): while the latter is solid as expected, the former seems to be weak to non–existing. Results further indicate that there is no interaction between sharing a stem and sharing an inflectional suffix—neither stem nor suffix priming is boosted when primes and targets also share the other morpheme. These data indicate an important difference between stems, derivational affixes and inflectional affixes, which we consider in the context of models of visual word identification and information theory.

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How Simple Complex Words Can Be: Morphological Processing and Word Representations

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A ◽

10.1080/14640748808402282 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 40 (1) ◽

pp. 41-72 ◽

Cited By ~ 39

Author(s):

Marijke W. Bergman ◽

Patrick T. W. Hudson ◽

Paul A. T. M. Eling

Keyword(s):

Word Recognition ◽

Morphological Structure ◽

Error Rates ◽

Morphological Processing ◽

Affect Recognition ◽

Simple Complex ◽

Morphological Complexity ◽

Complex Words ◽

Prefixed Words ◽

Do So

In four lexical decision experiments we studied the effect of morphological complexity on word recognition. Some potentially relevant linguistic aspects of derived nouns were varied: the location of the affix (prefix vs. suffix); the genuineness of the affix (real vs. pseudo); the orthographic legality of pseudo-stems; semantic compositionality; the nature of the stem (free vs. bound); the origin of the complex word (Latinate vs. Germanic); the currency of the stem (current vs. moribund). Furthermore, in the first two experiments, we systematically varied the proportion of complex and simple words to see whether strategies influence morphological effects on recognition times. Consistent with Taft's notion of affix stripping, pseudoprefixed words show longer mean decision times and higher error rates than truly prefixed words. Further, the prefixed and nonprefixed (but not pseudoprefixed) words are processed equally rapidly, indicating that a decompositional process is efficient. No differences were found, however, for suffixed, pseudosuffixed, and nonsuffixed words. There was no effect of the proportion of simple and complex words. There are some indications that the etymological origin of words may affect recognition times, but no other linguistic aspects of derivations do so. The results of the four experiments are interpreted as supporting a left-to-right process for word recognition in which morphemes are extracted automatically. During this process information encoded by morphological structure becomes available for other processes.

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Root-letter priming in Maltese visual word recognition

The Mental Lexicon ◽

10.1075/ml.18001.gea ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 1-25

Author(s):

Jonathan A. Geary ◽

Adam Ussishkin

Keyword(s):

Word Recognition ◽

Visual Word Recognition ◽

Masked Priming ◽

Morphological Processing ◽

Visual Word ◽

Facilitatory Effect ◽

Decision Task ◽

Semitic Languages ◽

Reading Experience

Abstract We report on a visual masked priming experiment designed to explore the role of morphology in Maltese visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, subjects were faster to judge Maltese words of Semitic origin that were primed by triconsonantal letter-strings corresponding to their root-morphemes. In contrast, they were no faster to judge Maltese words of non-Semitic origin that were primed by an equivalent, but non-morphemic, set of three consonant letters, suggesting that morphological overlap, rather than simple form overlap, drives this facilitatory effect. Maltese is unique among the Semitic languages for its orthography: Maltese alone uses the Latin alphabet and requires that all vowels are written, making such triconsonantal strings illegal non-words to which Maltese readers are never exposed, as opposed to other Semitic languages such as Hebrew in which triconsonantal strings often correspond to real words. Under a decomposition-based account of morphological processing, we interpret these results as suggesting that across reading experience Maltese readers have abstracted out and stored root-morphemes for Semitic-origin words lexically, such that these morphemic representations can be activated by exposure to root-letters in isolation and thus prime morphological derivatives.

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The Role of Morphology in Reading in Spanish-Speaking Children with Dyslexia

The Spanish Journal of Psychology ◽

10.1017/sjp.2013.58 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 16 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Paz Suárez-Coalla ◽

Fernando Cuetos

Keyword(s):

Reading Disabilities ◽

Morphological Structure ◽

Phonological Recoding ◽

Age And Gender ◽

Spanish Speaking ◽

Complex Stimuli ◽

And Gender ◽

Complex Words ◽

Reading In Spanish

AbstractMorphemes facilitate visual word recognition, leading to greater accuracy and fluency in reading morphologically complex words. In children with dyslexia, the morphological structure might be useful to reduce difficulties caused by phonological deficits. The aim of this study was to determine whether Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia benefit from morphemes when reading. A group of children with dyslexia of different ages (7 to 10 years) and a group of children without reading disabilities, matched on chronological age and gender, participated in a task of reading isolated words and pseudowords in which morphological complexity was manipulated. Half of the stimuli were morphologically simple and half morphologically complex. Children with dyslexia benefit from morphology since they have better performance with the morphologically complex stimuli. These results indicate that they are able to develop representations of units larger than the grapheme, what suggests that Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia use the morphological structure to overcome their difficulties in phonological recoding. These results have important implications for the rehabilitation of children with dyslexia.

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Differentiating Morphology, Form, and Meaning: Neural Correlates of Morphological Complexity

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn.2007.19.9.1464 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 19 (9) ◽

pp. 1464-1475 ◽

Cited By ~ 58

Author(s):

Mirjana Bozic ◽

William D. Marslen-Wilson ◽

Emmanuel A. Stamatakis ◽

Matthew H. Davis ◽

Lorraine K. Tyler

Keyword(s):

Morphological Structure ◽

Neural Correlates ◽

Lexical Organization ◽

Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽

Resonance Imaging ◽

Morphological Complexity ◽

Joint Contribution ◽

Complex Words ◽

Identity Priming

The role of morphological structure in word recognition raises issues about the nature and structure of the language system. One major issue is whether morphological factors provide an independent principle for lexical organization and processing, or whether morphological effects can be reduced to the joint contribution of form and meaning. The independence of form, meaning, and morphological structure can be directly investigated using derivationally complex words, because derived words can share form but need not share meaning (e.g., archer-arch). We used an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm to investigate priming between pairs of words that potentially shared a stem, where this link was either semantically transparent (e.g., bravely-brave) or opaque (e.g., archer-arch). These morphologically related pairs were contrasted with identity priming (e.g., mist-mist) and priming for pairs of words that shared only form (e.g., scandal-scan) or meaning (e.g., accuse-blame). Morphologically related words produced significantly reduced activation in left frontal regions, whether the pairs were semantically transparent or opaque. The effect was not found for any of the control conditions (identity, form, or meaning). Morphological effects were observed separately from processing form and meaning and we propose that they reflect segmentation of complex derived words, a process triggered by surface morphological structure of complex words.

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