Mind the suffix: Pseudoword processing in children and adults

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology

Background:

• Previous research indicates pseudowords with real morphemes are harder to process than those without.
• This difficulty is debated, with explanations focusing on morphological structure or semantic interpretability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether morphological composition or semantic interpretability drives processing differences in pseudowords.
• To determine if morphemes are activated during pseudoword processing in children and adults.

Main Methods:

• A lexical decision task was used with 92 children and 42 adults.
• Pseudowords were manipulated for morphological status while controlling for semantic interpretability.

Main Results:

• Pseudowords composed of real morphemes led to significantly longer processing times (latencies) and increased errors compared to pseudowords without morphemes.
• These findings held true even when semantic interpretability was controlled.

Conclusions:

• The morphological structure of pseudowords, not just semantic interpretability, influences processing.
• Morpheme activation occurs during pseudoword processing, even in early stages of reading development.