Finding the man amongst many: A developmental perspective on mechanisms of morphological decomposition

Skilled reading is characterized by rapid recognition of morphologically complex words. Evidence suggests that adult readers segment complex words into their constituent morphemes during visual word recognition, and that this extends to items that have only a surface morphological structure (e.g., corner), a process termed 'morpho-orthographic segmentation'. It is not yet known how and when this mechanism is established over the course of reading development, although data from English-speaking children suggest that it may be a relatively late-acquired milestone. The purpose of this study was to examine for the first time the mechanisms driving morphological processing across late childhood and adolescence. A cross-sectional sample of 204 children and adolescents from South-East England, ranging in age from 9 to 18 years (M age = 13.74 years, SD = 2.68; 110 female), completed a visual masked prime lexical decision task using three sets of prime-target pairs: morphological (e.g., teacher - TEACH), pseudomorphological (sharing an apparent morphological relationship in the absence of a semantic relationship, e.g., corner - CORN), and form (sharing an orthographic relationship only, e.g., window - WIND). Linear mixed effects models revealed both morphological and pseudomorphological priming in the absence of form priming, with priming magnitude increasing in line with age, and stronger evidence of morpho-orthographic segmentation emerging in line with word reading efficiency. Our findings reveal advances in the reading system during adolescence which may reflect accumulated exposure to regularities in the writing system, facilitating rapid access to meaning from print.