Speaker
Marcus Taft
(School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Australia)
Description
A masked priming experiment was designed to compare an account of visual polymorphemic word recognition that entails obligatory decomposition and a dual pathways account where such decomposition is supplemented with a whole-word recognition system through which words are decomposed post-lexically. Letter transposition was applied to word primes taken from a previous study, creating nonword primes by disrupting the suffix of truly derived words (e.g., *hunetr-HUNT*), the pseudo-suffix of pseudo-derived words (e.g., *corenr-CORN*), and the non-suffix of non-derived words (e.g., *casehw-CASH*). Priming was observed for the derived words whether disrupted or intact, and no priming was observed for the non-suffixed words whether disrupted or intact. In contrast, the priming found for the pseudo-derived words when they were intact disappeared when disrupted. Such a result opposed the single pathway decomposition model since letter transposition should have affected truly suffixed and pseudo-suffixed words in exactly the same way. Instead, a dual pathways model was supported whereby decomposition occurs only through post-lexical decomposition when the affix is disrupted. However, such a conceptualisation was opposed by a second experiment in which priming was equally strong for inappropriately suffixed nonwords when disrupted (e.g., *noveilsm-NOVEL*) as when intact (e.g., *novelism-NOVEL*), given that nonwords cannot be decomposed post-lexically. Discussion will centre on how the two sets of results might be reconciled.
Primary author
Marcus Taft
(School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Australia)
Co-authors
Elisabeth Beyersmann
(Department of Cognitive Science and ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney)
Jonathan Grainger
(Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Aix-Marseille University)
