Root-letter priming in Maltese visual word recognition
We report on a visual masked priming experiment designed to explore the role of morphology in Maltese visual word recognition. In a
lexical decision task, subjects were faster to judge Maltese words of Semitic origin that were primed by triconsonantal
letter-strings corresponding to their root-morphemes. In contrast, they were no faster to judge Maltese words of non-Semitic
origin that were primed by an equivalent, but non-morphemic, set of three consonant letters, suggesting that morphological
overlap, rather than simple form overlap, drives this facilitatory effect. Maltese is unique among the Semitic languages for its
orthography: Maltese alone uses the Latin alphabet and requires that all vowels are written, making such triconsonantal strings
illegal non-words to which Maltese readers are never exposed, as opposed to other Semitic languages such as Hebrew in which
triconsonantal strings often correspond to real words. Under a decomposition-based account of morphological processing, we
interpret these results as suggesting that across reading experience Maltese readers have abstracted out and stored root-morphemes
for Semitic-origin words lexically, such that these morphemic representations can be activated by exposure to root-letters in
isolation and thus prime morphological derivatives.
Article outline
- Methods
- Subjects
- Stimulus materials
- Procedures
- Data Analysis
- Results
- RT analysis
- Error rate analysis
- Discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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