Is morpho-orthographic decomposition purely orthographic? Evidence from masked priming in the same–different task

Two experiments used the cross-case same–different task to test whether the orthographically driven morphological decomposition effects that have been found in the lexical decision task are obligatory. Experiment 1 replicated the manipulation used by Duñabeitia, Perea, and Carreiras (2007), testing transposed-letter (TL) priming effects spanning the boundary between the affix and the stem. In contrast to their finding observed with the lexical decision task, TL priming effect did not vanish with polymorphemic or pseudomorphemic words. Experiment 2 used the manipulation used by Rastle, Davis, and New (2004), comparing the effects of polymorphemic affixed words (e.g., walker), pseudo-affixed words (e.g., corner), and nonaffixed monomorphemic words (e.g., brothel) in target word recognition. Unlike the results observed in the original lexical decision study, equal priming effects were observed with all three types of words. These results suggest that the presence of an orthographically defined subunit (affix) is not sufficient to drive morphological decomposition processes.