Morphological and orthographic similarity in visual word recognition

The differential impact of orthographic and morphological relatedness on visual word recognition was investigated in a series of priming experiments in Dutch and German. With lexical decision and naming tasks, repetition priming and contiguous priming procedures, and masked and unmasked prime presentation, a pattern of results emerged with qualitative differences between the effects of morphological and form relatedness. With lexical decision, mere orthographic similarity between primes and targets (e.g., keller-KELLER, cellar-ladle) produced negative effects, whereas morphological relatedness (e.g., kellen-KELLE, ladles-ladle) consistently resulted in facilitation. With the naming task, positive priming effects were found for morphological as well as for mere form similarity. On the basis of these results, a model of the lexicon is proposed in which information about word form is represented separately from morphological structure and in which processing at the form level is characterized in terms of activation of, and competition between, form-related entries.