An electrophysiological investigation of early effects of masked morphological priming

This experiment examined event-related responses to targets preceded by semantically transparent morphologically related primes (e.g., farmer-farm), semantically opaque primes with an apparent morphological relation (cornercorn), and orthographically, but not morphologically, related primes (scandalscan) using the masked priming technique combined with a semantic categorisation task. In order to provide information about possible early effects of morphology we focused our analysis on the N250 ERP component. Priming effects for transparent and opaque items patterned together in the early phase of the N250 (200-250 ms), whereas the transparent and orthographic items patterned together in the latter phase of this component (250-300 ms). These results provide further evidence in support of the rapid extraction of morphemes from morphologically complex stimuli independently of the semantic relatedness of the whole and its parts.