Morpho-orthographic segmentation of opaque and transparent derived words: New evidence for Spanish

2020 ◽  
pp. 174702182097703
Author(s):  
Miguel Lázaro ◽  
Lorena García ◽  
Víctor Illera

Semantic transparency has been extensively analysed in research on visual word recognition. Under the masked priming paradigm, it has consistently been shown that opaque and transparent words are facilitated relative to form-related controls, but differences in priming between one condition and another have not been conclusively proven. Hence, research has been unable to theoretically elucidate the possible value of semantic transparency in the processing of derived words. This study describes two lexical decision experiments in Spanish. Experiment 1 revealed differences between the transparent and orthographic conditions, with no differences between the other conditions in the analyses of the error rates. In the second experiment, the participants visited the laboratory on two occasions, separated by a week. The task was administered twice, with participants responding to one of the experimental lists on each day. The results of this second experiment revealed significant differences in the size of the priming effect of the opaque and transparent conditions compared with the form-related condition, but without differences between these two effects. We discuss these findings from the perspective of current models of visual lexical processing.

Author(s):  
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia ◽  
Manuel Perea ◽  
Manuel Carreiras

One essential issue for models of bilingual memory organization is to what degree the representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In this study, we examine whether there is a symmetrical translation priming effect with highly proficient, simultaneous bilinguals. We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with cognate and noncognate translation equivalents. Results showed a significant masked translation priming effect for both cognates and noncognates, with a greater priming effect for cognates. Furthermore, the magnitude of the translation priming was similar in the two directions. Thus, highly fluent bilinguals do develop symmetrical between-language links, as predicted by the Revised Hierarchical model and the BIA+ model. We examine the implications of these results for models of bilingual memory.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Wang ◽  
Marcus Taft

The present study investigates how morphological information is processed and represented in the bilingual lexicon. We employed a masked cross-language morphological priming paradigm to examine morphological decomposition and semantic transparency in bilingual lexical processing. A robust and reliable morphological priming effect was observed for both transparent compounds and opaque compounds, though there was a strong trend for more facilitation in the former than the latter. To account for these results, we propose a lemma-based bilingual model specifying the activation/competition between lemmas during cross-language activation at the morphological level. Our novel findings advance the understanding of interplay between morphology and bilingualism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
Lucia Colombo ◽  
Giacomo Spinelli ◽  
Stephen J Lupker

There are now a number of reports in the literature that transposed letter (TL) priming effects emerge when two consonants are transposed (e.g., caniso-CASINO) but not when two vowels are transposed (e.g., cinaso-CASINO). In the present article, four masked priming lexical decision experiments, two in Italian and two in English, are reported in which TL priming effects involving the transposition of two adjacent consonants (e.g., atnenna-ANTENNA) were contrasted with those involving the transposition of a vowel and an adjacent consonant (e.g., anetnna-ANTENNA), a contrast not directly examined in the previous literature. In none of the experiments was there any indication that the priming effects were different sizes for the two types of transpositions, including Experiment 4 in which a sandwich priming paradigm was used. These results support the assumption of most orthographic coding models that the consonant–vowel status of the letters is not relevant to the nature of the orthographic code. The question of how to reconcile these results with other TL manipulations investigating vowel versus consonant transpositions is discussed.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina Marjanovic ◽  
Davide Crepaldi

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.


Author(s):  
Phoebe Gaston ◽  
Linnaea Stockall ◽  
Sarah VanWagenen ◽  
Alec Marantz

Psycholinguistic research on the processing of morphologically complex words has largely focused on debates about how/if lexical stems are recognized, stored and retrieved. Comparatively little processing research has investigated similar issues for functional affixes. In Word or Lexeme Based Morphology (Aronoff, 1994), affixes are not representational units on par with stems or roots. This view is in stark contrast to the claims of linguistic theories like Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993), which assign rich representational content to affixes. We conducted a series of eight visual lexical decision studies, evaluating effects of derivational affix priming along with stem priming, identity priming, form priming and semantic priming at long and short lags. We find robust and consistent affix priming (but not semantic or form priming) with lags up to 33 items, supporting the position that affixes are morphemes, i.e., representational units on par with stems. Intriguingly, we find only weaker evidence for the long-lag stem priming effect found in other studies. We interpret this asymmetry in terms of the salience of different morphological contexts for recollection memory.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (10) ◽  
pp. 2554-2562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoko Witzel

This study examines whether synonyms are represented similarly to translation equivalents in the bilingual mind. In particular, this study investigated whether there is masked synonym priming such that it will simulate masked translation priming in the L1-L2 direction. Given that masked translation priming studies consistently show priming in the L1-L2 direction, it was predicted that synonyms should show a masked priming effect if the prime was higher in frequency than the target. Contrary to what Bilingual Interactive Activation models would predict, there was no priming for synonyms in the high-to-low frequency (HF-LF) condition or in the low-to-high frequency (LF-HF) condition in Experiment 1. Experiment 2 only tested the HF-LF condition to ensure that previous exposure to LF words within the experiment did not affect the results. Again, no HF-LF synonym priming was observed. The effect sizes of these synonym priming effects were comparable with that of L2-L1 translation priming, all of which were weak. This is not surprising given that semantic interpretation of a given word usually occurs post-lexically and requires partial awareness. What is surprising is that there is robust evidence showing strong L1-L2 masked translation priming effect, which bilingual lexical processing models should attempt to explain, thereby uncovering the relations between L1 words and their L2 translations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 492-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
FABIENNE CHETAIL ◽  
STÉPHANIE MATHEY

ABSTRACTThis study investigated whether and to what extent phonemic abilities of young readers (Grade 5) influence syllabic effects in reading. More precisely, the syllable congruency effect was tested in the lexical decision task combined with masked priming in eleven-year-old children. Target words were preceded by a pseudo-word prime sharing the first three letters that either corresponded to the syllable (congruent condition) or not (incongruent condition). The data showed that the syllable priming effect interacted with the score of phonemic abilities. In children with good phonemic skills, word recognition was delayed in the congruent condition compared to the incongruent condition, while it was speeded up in children with weaker phonemic skills. These findings are discussed in a lexical access model including syllable units.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (6) ◽  
pp. 856-867
Author(s):  
Hayley Tseng ◽  
Shane Lindsay ◽  
Colin J Davis

Much of the recent masked nonword priming literature demonstrates no difference in priming between affixed and non-affixed nonword primes (e.g., maskity-MASK vs. maskond-MASK). A possible explanation for the absence of a difference is that studies have used affixed primes which were semantically uninterpretable. Therefore, this explanation indicates semantic interpretability plays a fundamental role in masked priming. To test this account, we conducted an experiment using the masked priming paradigm in the lexical decision task. We compared responses with targets which were preceded by one of four primes types: (1) interpretable affixed nonwords (e.g., maskless-MASK), (2) uninterpretable affixed nonwords (e.g., maskity-MASK), (3) non-affixed nonwords (e.g., maskond-MASK), and (4) unrelated words (e.g., tubeful-MASK). Our results follow the trend of finding no difference between affixed and non-affixed primes. Critically, however, we observed no difference in priming between uninterpretable and interpretable affixed primes. Thus, our results suggest that semantic interpretability does not influence masked priming.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teon L Brooks ◽  
Peter C. Gordon

Compound words have two free morphemes whose individual meanings can have a transparent (e.g., roadside) or opaque (e.g., butterfly) relationship to the overall meaning. It is unclear when meaning is accessed during lexical processing of compounds (and other morphologically complex words), with conflicting results from priming in lexical-decision studies and from reading-time studies that examine how the characteristics of a compound affect its processing. The present studies examined eye-movement measures on target words in a sentence as a function of their relation in form and meaning to a prime word that occurred earlier in the sentence. In Experiment 1 the primes were transparent or opaque compounds and the targets were the first constituent of the compound (e.g., doll preceded by dollhouse vs. container; and brief preceded by briefcase vs. portfolio). First-pass measures showed that target-word recognition was facilitated by prior processing of the compound but that the amount of facilitation was not affected by semantic transparency, a pattern that suggests that there is a stage of processing where compounds are decomposed into their constituent morphemes regardless of their composite meaning. Experiment 2 used first constituents as primes and compounds as targets. First-pass measures showed priming on recognition of both transparent and opaque compounds. Priming facilitation persisted on later measures of lexical processing for transparent compounds but became inhibitory for opaque compounds. These results show that compounds are initially decomposed into their constituent words independently of meaning, but that later in processing activation of the meaning of a constituent word facilitates comprehension of semantically consistent compounds but competes with comprehension of semantically inconsistent compounds.


Author(s):  
Manuel Perea ◽  
Heather Winskel ◽  
Theeraporn Ratitamkul

In Indo-European languages, letter position coding is particularly noisy in middle positions (e.g., judge and jugde look very similar), but not in the initial letter position (e.g., judge vs. ujdge). Here we focus on a language (Thai) which, potentially, may be more flexible with respect to letter position coding than Indo-European languages: (i) Thai is an alphabetic language which is written without spaces between words (i.e., there is a degree of ambiguity in relation to which word a given letter belongs to) and (ii) some of the vowels are misaligned (e.g., [Formula: see text]/ε:bn/ is pronounced as /bε:n/), whereas others are not (e.g., [Formula: see text]/a:p/ is pronounced as /a:p/). We conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with 3–4 letter Thai words (with vs. without an initial misaligned vowel) in which the prime was: (i) identical to the target, (ii) a nonword generated by transposing the two initial letters of the target, or (iii) a replacement-letter control nonword. Results showed a significant masked transposed-letter priming effect in the initial letter positions, which was similar in size for words with and without an initial misaligned vowel. These findings reflect that: (i) letter position coding in Thai is very flexible and (ii) the nature of the obtained priming effects is orthographic rather than phonological.


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