Early morpho-orthographic and semantic effects in word recognition: Evidence from a foveal-splitting dichoptic...

How is a word visually recognized? We investigated word recognition by employing a novel psychophysical task in which word segments (true morphemes or nonmorphemic orthographic sequences) were colored blue/red, red/blue, or black, while participants wore anaglyph glasses. The color combinations split the words either at the morpheme boundary (legal split) or at one character to the left or to the right of the split (illegal split). This manipulation divided the retinal information along the fovea, allowing us to project the different word segments to both left and right hemispheres via contralateral and ipsilateral visual pathways. Our goal was to investigate the roles of morphology and semantics in the early moments of visual word recognition, potentially tapping functional properties of the visual word form area. Participants (N = 72) performed a masked lexical decision task (60 ms exposure) to semantically transparent compounds (e.g., football), monomorphemic pseudocompounds (e.g., shamrock), and unsegmentable monomorphemic words (e.g., jeopardy). We found an effect of legality for compounds and pseudocompounds, when presented via the stronger contralateral visual pathways, suggesting an early morpho-orthographic segmentation, but with true compounds yielding faster and more accurate responses than pseudocompounds across all projection combinations. Our results are compatible with a model of visual word recognition involving an initial stage of morpho-orthographic analysis that is insensitive to semantics, followed by later stages of morphological computations and semantic access. Although our evidence relies on a psychophysical task, we suggest that these processing stages are in line with a functional division between visual word form area-1 (orthographic) and visual word form area-2 (lexical) in the early visual word recognition system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).