Early morphological processing is morphosemantic and not simply morpho-orthographic: a violation of form-then-meaning accounts of word recognition

Abstract

Many studies have suggested that a word's orthographic form must be processed before its meaning becomes available. Some interpret the (null) finding of equal facilitation after semantically transparent and opaque morphologically related primes in early stages of morphological processing as consistent with this view. Recent literature suggests that morphological facilitation tends to be greater after transparent than after opaque primes, however. To determine whether the degree of semantic transparency influences parsing into a stem and a suffix (morphological decomposition) in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared patterns of facilitation between semantically transparent (e.g., coolant-cool) and opaque (e.g., rampant-ramp) prime-target pairs. Form properties of the stem (frequency, neighborhood size, and prime-target letter overlap), as well as related-unrelated and transparent-opaque affixes, were matched. Morphological facilitation was significantly greater for semantically transparent pairs than for opaque pairs. Ratings of prime-target relatedness predicted the magnitude of facilitation. The results limit the scope of form-then-meaning models of word recognition and demonstrate that semantic similarity can influence even early stages of morphological processing.

Figure 1

Summary of the published evidence on morphological priming for short stimulus onset asynchronies. The panels plot the reaction times (RTs, in milliseconds) in the present study (crosses) in the context of the 16 previously published studies for which the RTs were available (circles). The contour plots estimate the likelihood of finding an observation in a particular part of the space from only the circles. The solid line represents the identity condition (i.e., no priming) between the two plotted conditions. Panels A and B compare the RTs of morphologically related conditions (A) and the corresponding baselines (B) for both transparent and opaque RTs. Panels C and D compare transparent (C) and opaque (D) RTs to related and unrelated prime–target pairs. The vertical distance of each point to the solid identity line in Panels C and D represents the amount of priming. In the four panels, the present experiment falls well within the normal pattern of spread of the previously published ones, independently of how they are compared.