Morphological analysis in sentence reading

Abstract In two experiments, adults' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences containing prefixed (e.g., revive ) or pseudoprefixed (e.g., rescue ) words closely matched on initial letter pattern, frequency, length, and syntactic category. It was found that pseudoprefixed words received longer fixations and were associated with shorter departing saccades than prefixed words. These results supported the hypothesis that words are stripped of their prefixes prior to lexical access, and that stem morphemes are represented and accessed in the lexicon. Two specific models that assume prefix stripping were tested by varying the availability of parafoveal preview of the prefix or pseudoprefix. It was found that prefix stripping seemed to be a foveal rather than a parafoveal process, so that the parafoveal preview results could not readily distinguish between the two models.

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