Speaker
Christos Pliatsikas
(School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading)
Description
Four experiments investigate the effects of covert morphological complexity during
visual word recognition. Zero-derivations occur in English in which a change of grammatical
class occurs without any change in surface form (e.g., a bridge-to bridge; to bump-a bump).
Bridge is object-derived and is a basic noun (N), whereas bump is action-derived and is a
basic verb (V). As the suffix {-ing} is only attached to verbs, deriving bridging from its base,
requires two steps, bridge(N)>bridge(V)>bridging(V), while bumping can be derived in one
step from bump(V). Experiments 1 to 3 used masked-priming at different prime durations, to
test matched sets of one and two-step verbs for morphological (bumping-BUMP) and
semantic priming (jolting-BUMP). Experiment 4, employed a delayed-priming paradigm in
which the full verb forms (bumping and bridging) were primed by noun and verb phrases (a
bump/to bump, a bridge/to bridge). In both paradigms, different morphological priming
patterns were observed for one-step and two-step verbs that can be distinguished from purely
semantic effects. Our results demonstrate that morphological processing cannot be reduced
to surface form-based segmentation.
Primary author
Christos Pliatsikas
(School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading)
Co-authors
Aditi Lahiri
(University of Oxford)
Debra Malpass
(University of Birmingham)
Linda Wheeldon
(University of Birmingham)
