Speaker
Sascha Schroeder
(Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Description
Masked priming studies comparing morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic processing in children have seen an increase in recent years. However, the exact developmental trajectory of morphological priming effects remains unclear. It has been suggested that, for adults, the effects are modulated by reading, spelling, and vocabulary skills. This is of special relevance when studying children for whom these skills are still undergoing changes. In order to take this developmental aspect into account, we examined masked morphological priming longitudinally in a large group of elementary school children from second to fourth grade.
A masked priming lexical decision task with suffixed words (kleidchen-kleid, like farmer-farm), suffixed nonwords (kleidtum-kleid, like farm-farmity), nonsuffixed nonwords (kleidekt-kleid, like farm-farmach), and unrelated control words as primes was administered to 100 children in grade 2, and again in grade 3 and 4. Growth curve analysis shows that facilitation from suffixed words and suffixed nonwords emerge simultaneously in grade 4, but no effects can be observed before. The findings shed new light on the mechanisms involved in the development of morphological processing from a longitudinal perspective. Additional analyses will explore how specific person and item characteristics influence the developmental trajectory.
Primary author
Sascha Schroeder
(Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Co-authors
Elisabeth Beyersmann
(Macquarie University, Sydney)
Jana V. Hasenäcker
(Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
