Form and meaning in early morphological processing: Comment on Feldman, O'Connor, and Moscoso del Prado Martin (2009)

Abstract

Feldman, O'Connor, and Moscoso del Prado Martín (2009) reported evidence for differential priming of semantically transparent (talker-talk) and semantically opaque (corner-corn) morphological pairs under masked presentation conditions. The present commentary argues that these data should not call into question the theory that morphologically structured words undergo a segmentation process based solely on form, because (1) these results do not contradict existing evidence for morpho-orthographic segmentation, (2) funnel plots suggest that the lack of priming observed for semantically opaque items in this study is inconsistent with findings in the existing literature, and (3) orthographic characteristics of the semantically opaque pairs in this study (rather than semantic factors) are the most likely explanation for these discrepant results.