Morphological decomposition in early visual word processing

In this study, we looked at priming effects produced by a short presentation (47 ms) of morphologically complex pseudowords in French. In Experiment 1, we used as primes semantically interpretable pseudowords made of the grammatical combination of a root and a suffix, such as rapidifier “to quickify.” In Experiment 2, we used non-morphological pseudowords such as rapiduit, where -uit is an existing ending in French, but is not a suffix. In Experiment 3, primes were pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and suffixes, such as sportation, formed by the noun sport “sport” and the suffix -ation (-ation only attaches to verbs). Results of Experiment 1 show that morphologically complex pseudowords significantly facilitated the recognition of their roots. This priming effect was equivalent to the facilitation obtained when existing derived words were used as primes. In Experiment 2, no priming effect was obtained with non-morphological pseudowords, demonstrating that the mere occurrence of the target at the beginning of the pseudoword prime is not sufficient to produce any priming and that an orthographic account of the results is not viable. Finally, Experiment 3 shows that the semantic interpretability of the morphologically complex pseudowords does not affect priming, as facilitation effect is obtained with morphologically complex non-interpretable pseudowords. The results reveal an early morphological decomposition triggered by the morphological structure of the prime, but insensitive to its lexicality or interpretability.