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The development of morphological representations in young readers: a cross-modal priming study
Pauline Quémart1, Laura M Gonnerman2, Jennifer Downing3
1Université de Poitiers, Université de Tours and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Poitiers, France.
Developmental Science
|October 13, 2017
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Morphemes significantly influence word organization in memory.
- Understanding morphemic influence on word recognition in children is crucial for developmental research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how morphemic information impacts English-speaking children's word recognition.
- To examine the interplay between form and meaning in morphological processing during reading development.
Main Methods:
- A lexical decision priming task was administered to 3rd and 5th graders.
- Auditory primes and visual targets were used, with varying degrees of semantic and form similarity.
- Prime-target pairs included low, moderate, and high semantic similarity, form-only, and meaning-only relationships.
Main Results:
- Graded priming effects were observed, correlating with the convergence of form and meaning.
- Children demonstrated sensitivity to both form and meaning in word recognition.
- Lexical decision times indicated a nuanced processing of morphological information.
Conclusions:
- Developing readers do not require explicit lexicalization of morphological units for word recognition.
- The ability to process word morphology relies on establishing robust connections between a word's form and its meaning.
- This study highlights the importance of integrated form-meaning processing in children's reading development.