Individual differences in processing pseudo-inflected nonwords
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2020/11/0044/000459Keywords:
morphological priming, nonwords, individual differencesAbstract
While the role of word stems has received much attention in morphological processing, the effects of inflectional suffixes on lexical access remain unclear. We address this gap as well as the contribution of individual differences on morphological segmentation with a visual priming experiment. Inflected and uninflected nonwords were preceded by a non-linguistic baseline string or the target’s suffix/word-final letters (e.g. XXXXing -> SMOYING). The results indicate that the suffix length is crucial for morphological effects to surface in visual priming and that morphological processing may be modulated by the individual’s reading profile and vocabulary size. We interpret this as evidence for variable morphemic activation: morphological cues can facilitate visual access when rapid whole-word processing is unavailable. The theoretical implications are discussed.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
