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Morphological facilitation following prefixed but not suffixed primes: lexical architecture or modality-specific
1Department of Psychology, The University at Albany, State University of New York and Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. lf503.albany.edu
Summary
Morphological facilitation effects depend on prime-target modality and affix position. Prefixed words show cross-modal facilitation, while suffixed words do not, suggesting modality-specific processing in word recognition.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Morphological facilitation, where related word forms enhance recognition, is a key aspect of lexical processing.
- Understanding how morphological structure interacts with presentation modality is crucial for models of word recognition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate morphological facilitation in immediate and long-term lexical decision tasks.
- To examine the role of prime-target modality (visual/auditory) and affix position (prefix/suffix) on morphological facilitation.
Main Methods:
- Lexical decision tasks were employed with English words.
- Primes included base-alone, prefixed, and suffixed forms of a target word.
- Presentation modality (visual/auditory) was varied for primes and targets, with short and long lags between them.
Main Results:
- At short lags, prefixed primes (e.g., prepay-payment) showed greater facilitation than suffixed primes (e.g., payable-payment) under cross-modal (visual-auditory) conditions.
- Visual-visual presentation yielded no significant difference based on affix position.
- At long lags, modality did not affect facilitation for prefixed or simple forms, but cross-modal presentation of suffixed primes resulted in no facilitation.
Conclusions:
- Morphological facilitation is influenced by the interaction between affix type and presentation modality.
- Prefixed and simple word processing appears robust across modality changes, reflecting stable lexical architecture.
- The lack of cross-modal facilitation for suffixed primes suggests modality-specific processing in word recognition.
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