Morphological priming, fragment completion, and connectionist networks

Abstract Long-term morphological priming is a form of repetition priming in which the identification of a word is primed by the prior presentation of a morphologically related word. We investigated morphological priming using a variant of the fragment completion task in which a word is briefly presented with one of its letters replaced by a pattern mask and subjects attempt to identify the letter “hidden” by the mask. In Experiment 1 a levels-of-processing manipulation at study was found to affect free recall but not masked fragment completion, suggesting that repetition priming in the latter task is not the result of explicit memory processes. Subsequent experiments revealed that both masked and standard fragment completion are influenced by morphological priming and that, although this effect cannot be attributed to the orthographic and phonological similarity of morphologically related words, it does vary in magnitude as a function of orthographic similarity. These results are consistent with a connectionist account of morphological priming in which morphological effects arise from the activation dynamics of a connectionist network even though morphological relationships are not explicitly represented in this network.