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The Science of Reading


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WIT) and pseudo‐morphological pairs that never had a meaningful connection (e.g., cornerCORN). Critically, priming effects for these items were shown to be greater than those for orthographically related items without an apparent morphological structure (e.g., brothelBROTH).

      Research investigating morphological priming effects in children of different ages has suggested that morpho‐orthographic segmentation may reflect a form of reading expertise. Beyersmann and colleagues reported that English speaking (Beyersmann, Castles, & Coltheart, 2012) and French speaking (Beyersmann, Grainger, Casalis, & Ziegler, 2015) primary school children show robust masked morphological priming effects, but only when morphological primes have a semantic relationship with targets. Beyersmann et al. (2012) found no evidence of priming based on the appearance of morphological structure (e.g., cornerCORN) in children between the ages of 8 and 10. Similar findings were observed for Hebrew primary school children between the ages of 9 and 12: Robust masked morphological priming when primes were semantically related to targets, but weak or null priming when they were not (Schiff, Raveh, & Fighel, 2012). These findings suggest that perhaps morpho‐orthographic segmentation is a form of analysis that is acquired only after extensive reading experience. This conclusion is consistent with work by Andrews and Lo (2013) investigating individual differences in masked priming amongst university students. They found that the morpho‐orthographic pattern is modulated by vocabulary and spelling ability, with pseudo‐morphological priming being stronger in people with good spelling skills.

      Lavric and colleagues (2012) tested this account by studying brain potentials as participants made lexical decisions to morphologically complex words (e.g., darkness), pseudo‐morphological words (e.g., corner), and nonmorphological stimuli (e.g., brothel). Results revealed that within the first 190 milliseconds, neural responses to stimuli in the two morphologically structured conditions were similar, and both differed significantly from neural responses to stimuli in the nonmorphological condition. Evidence of semantic involvement was observed 60 to 70 milliseconds later, when neural responses to stimuli in the pseudo‐morphological condition diverged from those in the other two conditions (Lavric, Elchlepp, & Rastle, 2012). The authors suggested that this second phase of recognition is suggestive of some type of process to repair the incorrect segmentation (e.g., corner is not “someone who corns”). These findings support a hierarchical model in which morphological decomposition is based initially on an orthographic analysis of morphemes, and is only later constrained by semantic information (see also Whiting, Shtyrov, & Marslen‐Wilson, 2014, for similar results using MEG methods). Conversely, these findings would appear to rule out any account in which the analysis of morphological information arises subsequent to lexical identification, such as the supra‐lexical model (Giraudo & Grainger, 2000).

Schematic illustration of theory of morphological decomposition based on classical localist approach. Schematic illustration of a theory of morphological processing based on a distributed-connectionist approach.