Does Prime Modality Influence Morphological Processing?

Facilitation among morphologically related words generally is impervious to the prefixed or suffixed structure of primes and targets. A notable exception arises, however, when both primes and targets are suffixed. More specifically, when primes are auditory and targets are visual, facilitation for a suffixed target (e.g., payment) is absent when it follows a prime (e.g., payable) that is morphologically related and suffixed (Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994). To account for null facilitation (viz., the "suffix-suffix" effect), Marslen-Wilson and his colleagues posit inhibitory links between suffixes of morphological relatives. The present study assesses the generality of the "suffix-suffix" effect. When morphological facilitation is assessed relative to an orthographically related baseline, suffixed primes facilitate derivationally as well as inflectionally related morphological targets when primes are visual as well as auditory in both the lexical decision and naming tasks. The present findings call into question lexical models that posit inhibitory links between suffixes of morphological relatives.

[1]  J. Grainger,et al.  Masked morphological priming in visual word recognition. , 1991 .

[2]  W. Badecker,et al.  Inflectional regularity: Probing the nature of lexical representation in a cross-modal priming task , 2002 .

[3]  R. Burchfield.  Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar. By W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera with the assistance of Andrew W. Mackie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1982. x + 561 , 1985 .

[4]  K. Forster,et al.  Lexical storage and retrieval of prefixed words , 1975 .

[5]  W. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Morphology and meaning in the English mental lexicon. , 1994 .

[6]  R. F. Stanners,et al.  Memory representation for morphologically related words. , 1979 .

[7]  J. Segui,et al.  On the representation and processing of prefixed and suffixed derived words: A differential frequency effect , 1989 .

[8]  B MacWhinney,et al.  Frequency and the lexical storage of regularly inflected forms , 1986, Memory & cognition.

[9]  L. Feldman,et al.  Morphological facilitation following prefixed but not suffixed primes: lexical architecture or modality-specific processes? , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[10]  P. Gordon,et al.  Frequency Effects and the Representational Status of Regular Inflections , 1999 .

[11]  H. Kucera,et al.  Computational analysis of present-day American English , 1967 .

[12]  K. Forster,et al.  REPETITION PRIMING AND FREQUENCY ATTENUATION IN LEXICAL ACCESS , 1984 .

[13]  G. A. Murrell,et al.  WORD RECOGNITION AND MORPHEMIC STRUCTURE , 1974 .

[14]  L. Feldman,et al.  Discrepancies between orthographic and unrelated baselines in masked priming undermine a decompositional account of morphological facilitation. , 2002 .

[15]  Xiaolin Zhou,et al.  Morphology, modality, and lexical architecture , 1997 .

[16]  Laurie Beth Feldman,et al.  Are morphological effects distinguishable from the effects of shared meaning and shared form , 2000 .

[17]  P. Zwitserlood,et al.  Morphological and orthographic similarity in visual word recognition. , 1995 .

[18]  W. Nelson Francis,et al.  FREQUENCY ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH USAGE: LEXICON AND GRAMMAR , 1983 .

[19]  Robert Schreuder,et al.  How Complex Simplex Words can be , 1997 .

[20]  K. Forster,et al.  What can we learn from the morphology of Hebrew? A masked-priming investigation of morphological representation. , 1997, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[21]  J. Segui,et al.  Morphological Priming Effect: The Role of Surface Frequency , 1999, Brain and Language.