Morphological processing: A comparison between free and bound stem facilitation

Linguists distinguish between words formed from free stems (e.g., actor: act) and those formed from bound stems (e.g., spectator: spect). In a forward masked priming task, we observed significant morphological facilitation for prime–target pairs that shared either a free (e.g., deform–CONFORM) or a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Brain and language 2004-07, Vol.90 (1), p.31-39
Main Authors: Pastizzo, Matthew J., Feldman, Laurie B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Comparative Analysis
Decision Making
Forward masked priming
Free and bound stem facilitation
Humans
Language Processing
Linguistics
Morphological family size
Morphology (Languages)
Reaction Time
Reading
Recognition (Psychology)
Semantics
Visual Perception
Word Recognition
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Summary:Linguists distinguish between words formed from free stems (e.g., actor: act) and those formed from bound stems (e.g., spectator: spect). In a forward masked priming task, we observed significant morphological facilitation for prime–target pairs that shared either a free (e.g., deform–CONFORM) or a bound (e.g., revive–SURVIVE) stem. Relative to an unrelated baseline, magnitudes of facilitation for free (e.g., form) and bound (e.g., vive) stems were significant and comparable, but relative to an orthographic baseline free stem facilitation was greater than bound stem facilitation. In addition, the magnitude of bound (but not free) stem morphological facilitation correlated with the number of morphological relatives.
ISSN:0093-934X
1090-2155
DOI:10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00417-6