Interplay of orthography and semantics in reading: an event-related potential study

Morphology refers to the subcomponents of words such as roots and affixes. It is unclear whether morphological properties of words go beyond a relationship between form and meaning. Here, using event-related brain potentials, we compared orthographic priming (e.g. archer-arch), semantic priming (e.g. vault-arch) and morphological priming (e.g. archway-arch) in participants performing a lexical decision task. Relative to baseline (i.e. no priming, e.g. frog-arch), orthographic priming modulated brain potentials from 190-460 ms poststimulus onset and semantic priming had a measurable effect only after 240 ms. Critically, morphological priming was well approximated by the cumulative effects of orthographic and semantic priming at all times. We conclude that morphological effects can be accounted for by the conjunction of orthography and semantics in a priming experiment.