Origins of cross-language differences in word

Origins of cross-language differences in word recognition A.B. Editor et al. (Editors) © 2005 Elsevier B.V./Ltd. All rights reserved.

1

Chapter 1

Origins of cross-language differences in word recognition Laurie Beth Feldman12 and Dana M. Basnight-Brown12 1 2

The University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY 12222 Haskins Laboratories 300 George St. New Haven, CT 06512

1. Introduction Claims that structural differences across language introduce variation in visual word recognition are not new. Comparisons across languages reveal variety with respect to orthographic, phonological and morphological structure. In the orthographic – phonological domain, languages differ with respect to whether written units correspond to syllables as in Chinese and Japanese kana, or to phonemes, as in alphabetic scripts such as English and Serbian. In this domain, when differences across languages in visual word recognition emerge, typically they are associated with orthographic depth and the complexity of the correspondences between spelling and sound. For example, latencies in the naming task are faster than in the lexical decision task in English and in Serbian. By contrast in Hebrew without its diacritics, where phonology is not fully specified, the pattern tends to reverse (Frost, Katz & Bentin, 1987). In the morphological domain, differing outcomes across language are attributed to factors associated with the prominence of combinations of base morphemes with (combinations of) affixes, either infixes, prefixes or suffixes and, consequently, to the systematicity with which words with similar form tend to be similar in meaning. Because of the tendency for base morphemes in Hebrew to appear in combination with other morphemes to form many words relative to base morphemes in English, some have suggested that the lexicon in morphologically rich languages, such as in Hebrew, is structured morphologically whereas in more

2

Feldman & Basnight-Brown

impoverished languages (meaning English) it is structured orthographically (Frost, Kugler, Deutsch, & Forster, 2005; Plaut & Frost, 2001). In traditional dual route accounts of phonological as well as morphological aspects of word recognition, recognition proceeds either by whole words or by analysis of constituents where options are mutually exclusive at early stages of processing. Consequently, the failure to observe effects of constituent (phoneme or morpheme) structure in word recognition tasks is interpreted as evidence in support of the whole word processing option. Within a less localist and more connectionist framework (Harm & Seidenberg, 1999, 2004; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), accounts of word recognition emphasize statistical learning of mappings between orthographic, phonological, and semantic codes. Options include mappings from spelling to meaning, or mappings from spelling to phonology and then to meaning. Instead of a single processing option determined by word regularity or a language’s orthographic depth, routes work cooperatively and interdependently with a division of labor. To anticipate, as one departs from the dichotomous processing framework based on routes that work competitively, and effects that either are present or absent, the argument for differing modes of processing across languages is not as persuasive as once believed, however. Part of the complexity when assessing evidence for cross language variation, is that different tasks, presentation formats, word structure and list composition often accompany changes in language. Consequently, methodological factors may contribute to or even create the illusion of cross-language variation in word recognition. In the present chapter we selectively review evidence from visual word recognition for language specific variation in the domains of orthographic, semantic, and morphological processing. We focus primarily on the primed visual lexical decision task with short presentations of the prime with (Forster & Davis, 1984) and without a forward mask (Feldman, 2000) because a large proportion of the experimental literature has focused on this very early stage of recognition. Early recognition is defined by processing time for the prime that is limited both by a preceding pattern mask and by the target that follows, or only by the target that follows. These are presentation conditions that purportedly minimize contamination from strategic and less automatic processes. To anticipate we argue that in visual word recognition, similarities across languages predominate over differences. Claims for

Origins of cross-language differences in word recognition

3

cross-language variation in early stages of processing appear less credible when methodologies are standardized and interpretations emphasize graded effects as opposed to dichotomized outcomes where significant effects are the focus and null effects are ignored even when the two do not differ statistically. 2. Effects of orthographic similarity: Language universal or language varying? It has been asserted that the organizational principle of the Hebrew lexicon is morpheme-based and therefore differs from that in the lexicon of speakers of Indo-European languages and that as a consequence, form effects fail to arise in Hebrew (Frost et al., 2005), whereas form priming is robust in Indo-European languages (Forster & Azuma, 2000; Rastle Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Tyler, 2000, Experiment 1). Nonetheless, a systematic examination of the orthographic priming literature restricted to forward masked prime presentations at prime durations less than 60 ms reveals that inhibitory or null effects within orthographically similar word-word prime-target pairs predominate across many languages. Although this finding has been replicated many times, careful comparison across studies reveals several experimental factors that may have contributed to the impression that facilitatory effects are common in English but not in non Indo-European languages (Frost et al., 2005). These factors include not only task and presentation conditions for the prime, but also neighborhood size, length and frequency of target, as well as definition of prime-target similarity, lexicality of the prime, and composition of filler items. We begin by delineating some properties of the target and then properties of the prime and its relation to the target that tend to produce graded inhibition in recognition tasks. These lead us to call into question the claim for reliable differences between languages with respect to processing of orthographic similarity. 2.1. Orthographic neighborhood size A word’s orthographic neighbors (N) (Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson & Besner, 1977) are those words that differ from it by a single letter (e.g., BOLD, HOLD, FOLD, MOLD, SOLD, GOLD, TOLL are some of the neighbors of TOLD). Effects of target N arise under both

4


single word and the primed presentation formats. The typical N effect (Andrews 1989, 1992; Forster & Shen, 1996) is that unprimed words with many neighbors (large neighborhoods) are recognized faster in the lexical decision task than those with fewer neighbors (small neighborhoods). Likewise, N or neighborhood density effects have been demonstrated in Spanish (Perea & Rosa, 2000) and in French (Ferrand & Grainger, 1992). For nonwords targets, large N tends to slow decision latencies. In the naming task, by contrast, increases in N decrease both word and nonword latencies in English (Andrews 1989; Sears, Hino & Lupker, 1995) and in French (Peereman & Content, 1995). It is possible that purported differences across languages with respect to the influence of form similarity between prime and target reflect orthographic characteristics of words and that any processing variation across languages is a consequence of the orthographic structure of its words. Specifically, target neighborhood size is not independent of target length such that longer words tend to have fewer neighbors (Baayen, Feldman & Schreuder, 2006; Barca, Burani & Arduino, 2002) and, perusal across languages reveals that average word length does vary. Therefore apparent differences among languages with respect to the role of orthographic similarity in visual word recognition may derive from differences in neighborhood size and average word length. Some of the original work on orthographic similarity in word recognition directly incorporated manipulations of target length and results are consistent with the claim that differing word length may contribute to or even underlie language-varying effects of form similarity. Typically in the range of 1-11 neighbors, orthographically related primes with many letters facilitate target processing (Forster, Davis, Schoknecht, & Carter, 1987), while those with fewer produce inhibition (Segui & Grainger, 1990). Thus, pairs such as ALTITUDE-ATTITUDE are more likely to produce facilitation than pairs like FACT-FACE. In the aggregate, words that are long have fewer neighbors and, the existence of many neighbors tends to increase activation in the lexicon and therefore biases a “word” response. However, with high levels of activation overall, the benefit of a related as contrasted with an unrelated prime may diminish. This account is consistent with the findings of Forster and Veres (1998) who observed facilitation following orthographically related nonwords whose magnitude depended on their structure. When the nonwords did not look like real English words, or had few neighbors, there was facilitation; when they did look like real words and had a large N, there was none.


5

2.2. Alternative measures of form similarity While number of neighbors or neighborhood size is the most thoroughly investigated, it is not the exclusive measure of a word’s orthographic similarity to other words. Also related to neighborhood size is “neighborhood distribution” (ND), the number of different letter positions in a target word where replacement of a single letter forms a neighbor. Greater inhibition with higher neighborhood distribution has been documented in French (Mathey, Robert, & Zagar, 2004) and in English (Johnson & Pugh, 1994). Twin neighbors of a target arise by multiple replacements of a letter in a constant position (e.g., changes in the 4th letter position of PROBE produce twin neighbors – PROVE, PROSE). By contrast, single neighbors, like the word IMPART for example, would have a distribution of 2, because substitutions in the 4th and 5th positions can produce neighbors IMPORT and IMPACT (Mathey et al., 2004, p. 535). Manipulating ND, while controlling N size and N frequency (all prime words were the highest frequency neighbor of the target) revealed that in French, ND interacted with forward masked priming such that single neighbors produced a significant inhibitory effect, while twin neighbors revealed the absence of an effect. The inhibitory influence of shared neighbors on forward masked priming has been replicated recently in English (Davis & Lupker, 2006). To reiterate, it is targets with large neighborhoods that are more likely to have neighbors that are distributed with respect to letter position as well as to have two or more neighbors in one position. When word targets are preceded by a prime that is orthographically similar and forward masked, word-word prime-target pairs in Dutch that do not share neighbors produce more facilitation than do pairs that do share neighbors (VanHeuven, Dijkstra, Grainger, & Schriefers, 2001). Similar effects have been reported in English such that inhibition increases as does the number of shared neighbors between prime and target (Davis & Lupker, 2005). Once again, it is targets with large neighborhoods that are more likely share neighbors with the prime. Originally, measures of orthographic similarity were constrained by length so that words of one length were assumed to activate only orthographic neighbors with the same number of letters. However, recent findings indicate that words can activate words not only of an equivalent length, but also those that share orthographic overlap and are of different lengths (DeMoor & Brysbaert, 2000). It is also the case that counts of

6


orthographic neighbors are generally based on corpora that fail to include inflected word forms so, for example, LAWS would not enter into the neighbor count for LAWN. Nonetheless, there is evidence from Polish (Feldman, Jarema, Perlak & Pastizzo, 2004) that for low frequency targets matched on length and surface frequency, decision latencies differed reliably as the number of orthographic neighbors increased, and that the sum of inflected as well as uninflected forms proved to be a better predictor of decision latencies than was number of uninflected neighbors alone. One final alternative definition of orthographic similarity derives from the number of body neighbors (BN), or number of words that share the orthographic body of a word but not necessarily its length. When N size is controlled, word recognition is typically faster (resulting in significant facilitation) for those French words that have many body neighbors (Ziegler & Perry, 1998). For example, DRIVE has many body neighbors, LIVE, THRIVE, HIVE, DIVE and STRIVE, but only one orthographic neighbor, DROVE. When Janack, Pastizzo, and Feldman (2004) included this factor by pairing primes with targets that were mismatched in either the initial (mast-CAST), final (cash-CAST) or partial neighbor condition (lash-CAST), however, for targets with N > 2, they observed significant inhibition across all three positions of mismatch, suggesting that body neighbors were no different from other measures in that all positions of mismatch produced inhibition. 2.3. Effects of prime frequency and lexicality on form priming Not only properties of the prime but also properties of the target, and the relation between prime and target, influence the magnitude and sometimes direction of any orthographic effect. In priming tasks, several variants of orthographic similarity tend to reduce or even eliminate the benefit of a large neighborhood. In addition to letters shared by prime and target, lower frequency prime words are more likely to show facilitation, whereas higher frequency prime words are more likely to inhibit the processing of orthographically similar target words. Similar findings have been reported in French, English, Dutch, and Italian (Arduino & Burani, 2004; Davis & Lupker, 2006; DeMoor & Brysbaert, 2000; Grainger & Ferrand, 1994). Curiously, the effect of relative frequency diminishes with the introduction of pseudohomophone filler trials, at least in French (Grainger & Ferrand, 1994). For example, JOIE and JOIS are pronounced similarly but only the first is a real word and


7

the presentation of JOIS type items attenuates the tendency for low frequency primes to facilitate recognition of the target. Finally, lexicality of the prime word modulates the outcome of orthographic similarity. As discussed previously, significant inhibition tends to arise after word primes, while combinations of word and nonword primes produce a null effect (Drew & Zwitserlood, 1995; Janack et al., 2004), or inhibition for word primes in conjunction with facilitation for nonword primes (Davis & Lupker, 2006; Forster & Veres, 1998). 2.4. Absence of form effects: Evidence of cross-item or cross-language variation? Across several languages, inhibition due to shared form tends to be more common than facilitation yet in some recent data of our own (Feldman & Basnight-Brown, submitted), we have observed that when targets are matched on surface frequency (94 (SD=118) vs. 119 (SD=194)), facilitatory as well as inhibitory patterns of forward masked facilitation arose but depended on the neighborhood size of the target. In the context of identity filler trials, we examined decision latencies to words that followed a morphologically (M), orthographically (O) or semantically (S) related prime that was forward masked. Importantly, when targets differed with respect to neighborhood size but the same targets appeared with morphologically (e.g., artist-ART), orthographically (e.g., artery- ART), and semantically related primes (e.g., craft- ART), results revealed significant orthographic inhibition for targets from small neighborhoods (7 (SD=3.6)), but nonsignificant facilitation for targets from large orthographic neighborhoods (17 (SD=3.4)). Targets after morphologically similar primes appeared to be less affected by the manipulation of neighborhood size of the target than were orthographic primes and those after semantic primes were not affected at all (see Table 1). Table 1. Magnitudes of facilitation for targets with large and small orthographic neighborhoods.

Small N Large N

ORTHO -32 (118) 12 (102)

FACILITATION MORPH SEM 42 (81) 19 (97) 56 (110) 18 (100)

8


Hebrew words typically are composed of a root and a word pattern comprised mainly of vowels. However, in many contexts, printed Hebrew words are written without vowels so spelling consists of a three letter root as well as the one or sometimes two letters of the word pattern that are not vowels. As a result, the typical printed Hebrew word is three to five letters in length. If estimates of orthographic neighborhood size are calculated on a word’s written form, then Hebrew words will tend to be composed of fewer letters and will have more neighbors than do English words. Consistent with this convention, in the long-term variant of the priming task, magnitudes of facilitation do not differ when letters from the word pattern interrupt the root morpheme and when they do not (Feldman & Bentin, 1994). It has been documented in English (Feldman & Basnight-Brown, submitted; Pollatsek, Perea & Binder, 1999) and in Spanish (Perea & Rosa, 2000) that the presence of many neighbors may facilitate word performance overall in the lexical decision task but it tends to reduce form facilitation. Accordingly in Hebrew, high levels of target activation based on the root may be responsible for the failure to detect form priming (Frost et al. 2005). In essence, similarity with many other words and high levels of orthographic activation overall may render targets less susceptible to influences of the prime context in which they appear. In conclusion, apparently different outcomes across languages in word recognition tasks may reflect overall levels of orthographic activation as a consequence of the extent to which words within a language resemble few or many other words. Effects of N sometimes are interpreted as evidence that word level knowledge can feed back to activation at the letter level. Forster and Veres (1998), described recognition as a two-part combination of facilitation and inhibition. When the orthographic prime (neighbor) is processed, it activates letters that are shared with the target, thereby facilitating lexical access. However, at the word level after access, competition arises (especially if the prime is a word with a frequency that is higher than that of the target), thereby creating an inhibitory effect. In this framework, competition due to factors such as shared neighbors between prime and target may be responsible for the absence of facilitation in many studies. This analysis is particularly appropriate for Hebrew where many written words are three or four letters in length, have multiple neighbors and presumably, many shared neighbors between prime and target.


9

2.5. Unmasked comparisons across languages Several experiments conducted across diverse languages have asked whether the brief (less than 60 ms) visual presentation of unmasked but orthographically similar word primes, not matched in length to the target (e.g., VOWEL-VOW), facilitate the processing of target words. Typically, orthographic controls in morphological studies are defined so as to preserve the initial portion of the word and length is allowed to vary. Collectively, outcomes range from inhibitory to null to facilitatory effects (see Feldman, 2000; Zwitserlood, 1996). For example, inhibitory effects under unmasked but brief visual presentation conditions have been documented in German and in Dutch (Zwitserlood, 1996) for pairs such as KERST (Christmas) - KERS (cherry), for Serbian pairs such as STANICA (station) - STAN (apartment) (Feldman & Moskovljević, 1987) and nonsignificant facilitation for English pairs such as VOWELVOW (Feldman, 2000). In conclusion, forward masked orthographic facilitation does not appear to be a reliable finding in English or in any other language and results vary little when the forward mask is eliminated. Experimental factors such as number of neighbors of the target, prime frequency relative to target, and number of shared neighbors between prime and target, seem to attenuate the magnitude of the inhibitory effect of orthographic similarity in all languages. In addition to these graded effects, prime lexicality can reverse the direction of the effect of similarity so as to render it facilitatory. Further, increases in target frequency seem to augment inhibitory effects (Davis & Lupker, 2006). Some or all of these factors in combination, but especially number of neighbors in conjunction with target length, are likely responsible for purportedly differing effects of orthographic similarity that have been reported across languages. By implication, it is essential to consider these factors and anticipate their graded effects when designing future studies and when making assertions about putative differences in lexical organization or processes of word recognition across languages. 3. Effects of frequency and semantic relatedness: Language universal or language varying? Languages with alphabetic writing systems differ with respect to their orthographic depth and the adequacy of predicting the phonology

10


requisite for naming from orthographic form. In large part, a language’s orthographic depth is related to the prevalence of irregular words where the mapping is more complex. In contrast to regular words whose phonology can be computed from its orthographic form without consideration of its semantics, the traditional account for irregular words is that an accurate pronunciation must be associated with, rather than computed from, an orthographic form. Stated in more connectionist terms, semantic properties become more important when the mapping between a word’s orthographic and phonological form is weak and not fully systematic. In a connectionist framework, systematicity of the mapping between orthographic and phonological form is crucial and the same basic characterization applies both across languages and among words within one language. The pronunciation of those English words whose mappings are irregular (e.g., SWORD, ANSWER, TONGUE) is unpredictable so that the phonology necessary for naming a word aloud cannot be computed independently of lexical and semantic knowledge about the word. Spelling in the Serbian language was reformed in the last century so that by comparison with English, an accurate pronunciation (with the exception of stress) always can be predicted from a word’s spelling. Italian is similar to Serbian in the regular correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, whereas Hebrew is closer to English in that conventional written forms in isolation fail to specify many vowels. An analog of phonological regularity, more precisely phonological specificity, exists in Hebrew and in Persian written forms with and without the inclusion of vowel diacritics. In earlier work promulgated as evidence of cross-language variation, effects on naming latencies of word frequency, a property of the whole word and a marker of lexical processing, varied with a language’s orthographic depth. Differential naming latencies for words of high and low frequency were more reliable in the “deep” writing systems of English and in Hebrew without vowel diacritics (Frost, 1994) than in the “shallow” writing systems of Serbian (Frost, Katz, & Bentin, 1987; Frost & Katz, 1992), Italian (Arduino & Burani, 2004), or Hebrew with diacritics (Frost, 1994). Results suggested to some that lexical or whole word processes were more salient when phonological specification was inaccurate or otherwise incomplete. However, others claimed it was processing time until onset of articulation, rather than orthographic depth per se, that determined the salience of lexical markers such as frequency. In support of a time criterion account, list composition can enhance or


11

diminish differences in latencies that correspond to manipulations of frequency (Lupker, Brown & Colombo, 1997). Similar outcomes have been documented for high and low frequency words in Korean Hangul as a function of the inclusion of phonographic or non phonographic filler trials (Simpson & Kang, 1994), and in Persian where words that are phonologically transparent and regular show a smaller frequency effect. Collectively, the salience of whole word processing as indexed by effects of a word’s surface frequency has been documented in many languages. Lexical effects are not independent of overall naming latencies, however. Finally across languages, lower frequency words tend to be more amenable to modulation by list composition and other manipulations than are higher frequency words. Similar to lexical specification of a word’s pronunciation as a gauge of lexical processing is the benefit to recognition of presenting a target word in the context of a semantically related word. One interpretation of speeded recognition or facilitation after a semantically related word in the naming task for English, but not for Serbian, was differing influences of a word’s semantics, also an aspect of lexical knowledge (Katz & Feldman, 1983). Analogously, semantic facilitation in the naming task is greater in English than in Italian (Tabossi & Laghi, 1992) or in Persian, where words that are phonologically opaque due to the deletion of letters for particular vowels show greater magnitudes of semantic facilitation than do phonologically transparent words (Baluch & Besner, 1991). Stated generally, across languages, the phonology that underlies naming a word is subject to lexical and semantic influences (Katz & Feldman, 1983). Semantic effects tend to be robust when orthographic depth tends to be greater and the mapping between grapheme and phoneme is more complex. Effects of imageability, a semantic property of the target, as distinguished from the prime-target pair, likewise have been documented and effects are more reliable for phonologically irregular than for regular targets. In particular, for low frequency phonologically irregular words in English, naming latencies are faster and more accurate for words that are high (e.g., SIEVE) relative to low (e.g., COUTH) in imageability (Shibahara, Zorzi, Hill, Wydell, & Butterworth, 2003; Strain, Patterson & Seidenberg, 1995). The outcome suggests that pronunciation for irregular words is more affected by semantics than for regular words. Naming latencies for two character Kanji words of Japanese (written in a non alphabetic and non phonemic script) reveal an analogous effect of imageability for low but not higher frequency words.

12


Effects of phonological complexity also can interact with semantic properties in the lexical decision task. For example in Serbian, strings that are phonologically ambiguous because they consist of letters that exist in both the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets but have different phonemic interpretations in each (e.g., PATAK can be read as /ratak/ in Cyrillic but as /patak/ in Roman) show greater magnitudes of semantic facilitation when targets are written in their phonologically ambiguous form than when the same targets are written in a phonologically unambiguous form (e.g., PATAK can be read only as /patak/). In summary, lexical involvement in word recognition, and especially naming, does vary across languages but effects seem to be accountable in terms of overall recognition latencies and time-limited processing rather than disparities across languages with respect to their overall orthographic depth. 4. Effects of morphological relatedness: Language universal or language varying? The study of morphological processing and the way in which prime-target pairs that share morphemes (e.g. ALLOWANCE-ALLOW) are stored in the lexicon also has been the subject of extensive cross linguistic comparisons, because languages vary considerably in the manner and the extent to which morphemes combine to form words. A final domain in which processing potentially differs cross-linguistically originates with morphological structure. Based on the prevalence of words formed by appending one or more prefixes or suffixes to a base morpheme, English morphology is impoverished compared with languages such as Serbian or Hebrew. Consequently, systematicities in the mappings from form to meaning, defined by the degree to which words that look alike have similar meanings, are weaker in English than in Serbian or Hebrew. The term morphological richness reflects the tendency, within a language, for morphemes to combine to form more words, but the term is used inconsistently as there is no consensus as to whether definitions of morphological richness should include derivational as well as inflectional word formations or should be restricted to (either inflectional or) derivational formations. Relatedly, the term morphological family size reflects the number of words (derivations and usually also compounds) formed from the base morpheme. In the case of exclusively inflectional formation, in comparison with other languages,


13

Hebrew no longer may qualify as a morphologically rich language. Nonetheless, some have suggested that processing in morphologically rich languages, referring to Hebrew, generally may be biased toward analysis of constituents and away from whole word processing. Two issues of long standing debate in morphological processing with potential for cross language variation are whether regular and irregular inflections are processed in the same manner or make use of separate mechanisms, and whether effects of morphological relatedness can be captured in terms of conjoint effects of similar form and similar meaning without invoking explicitly morphological representations. For the first, irregular inflection can entail form changes to the stem (e.g., HOPPED - RAN), substitutions of a less typical inflectional affix (e.g., TOASTED - BURNT) or alternations with a dissimilar full form (e.g., IS - WAS). For the issue of conjoint effects, not only morphological relatives formed by inflection (e.g., ALLOWED-ALLOW), but also those formed by derivation (e.g., ALLOWANCE-ALLOW) are of interest because, analogous to effects of form change, semantic transparency of the base morpheme can vary dramatically across words formed from the same base morpheme. Consequently, the degree of semantic similarity between pairs of morphologically related words can vary. The second source of potential cross-language variation in the morphological domain pertains to the role of semantics in early stages of morphological processing. Corresponding to the literature on orthographic priming, several characteristics of the prime word, target word or experimental conditions can influence the magnitude of morphological effects. The aim of the following section is to identify those factors that allegedly produce differences across languages in the single word and in the short-term forward masked and unmasked morphological priming tasks and to evaluate those claims. Some factors are methodological and parallel those in orthographic priming but first we address those that seem to originate from differing word formation processes across languages. 4.1. Modulations of morphological processing in single words One class of measures that plays a prominent role in morphological processing for derivations as well as inflections and thus contributes to single word decision latencies is a target’s morphological family size (i.e., the number of different words formed from a base morpheme thereby producing morphologically related words). Typically,

14


with appropriate controls, base morphemes with large families are recognized faster than those with small families (Schreuder & Baayen, 1997). For example, response latencies to a word like AUTHOR which appears in AUTHORESS, AUTHORITY, AUTHORITARIAN, AUTHORIZE and many other derived words, is faster than for CATCH, which appears in very few other words (e.g., CATCHER). Despite variation in morphological richness and average family size across languages, a facilitatory effect of large family size has been documented in a range of languages including, Dutch, German, English, and Finnish (Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997; Ford, Marslen-Wilson, & Davis, 2003; Ludeling, & De Jong, 2002; Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2003; Moscoso del Prado Martín, Bertram, Haikio, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2004). Entropy-based measures are newer and capture more structure within the morphological family by incorporating the frequencies of individual family members as well as the number of members. Derivational entropy focuses on the derived forms that constitute a family and analogously, inflectional entropy focuses on the inflected forms within a paradigm (Moscoso del Prado Martin, Ernestus & Baayen, 2004). Where large family size typically facilitates word processing, entropy measures provide for the interaction among family members where differences in surface frequency across individual members provides a correction to predictions based on family size alone (Kostić, Marković, & Baucal, 2003; Moscoso del Prado Martin, Kostić & Baayen, 2004). Stated simplistically, the inflectional and derivational entropy measures are important because they encompass both word-specific and base-morpheme frequency and therefore do not lend themselves to a dual route account where whole word and constituent (morpheme) processes for a word are mutually exclusive. The role of inflectional entropy has been investigated in English (Baayen, et al. 2006) and in the morphologically rich language of Serbian where it uses the probability of a particular syntactic function of a particular inflected form expressed in information theoretic terms to predict decision latencies (Kostić et al. 2004). Another frequency measure, affix frequency or numerosity, also influences processing in unprimed contexts in Dutch (Bertram, Schreuder & Baayen, 2000), Finnish (Bertram, Laine, Baayen, Schreuder & Hyona, 2000a; Bertram, Laine & Karvinen, 1999), Italian (Burani & Thornton, 2003; Laudanna & Burani, 1995), as well as English (Feldman, Frost & Pnini, 1995). Revealingly, an affix’s potential for homonymity or


15

multiple functions (e.g., as in agentive ER (SWEEPER) or comparative ER (NEATER)) seems to enhance the effect of surface frequency (Baayen et al., 1997; Bertam et al., 2000) and, at the same time, make it more difficult to detect an effect of base morpheme frequency. Insofar as it is a property of the affix, namely its multiple functions that seems to render whole word processes more salient, the effect is hard to reconcile with an account based on independent base morpheme analysis and whole word processing. A picture emerges where many researchers try to oppose various frequency measures and interpret effects as reflections of either constituent or whole word processing. Most typical is to assume that the routes work competitively so that the faster route wins, that the other option has no effect, and that there is no overall cost to operating two routes in parallel. Accordingly, evidence of whole word and analytic processes appeared to trade off so that the contribution of base morpheme frequency becomes more dominant as surface frequency decreases. For example, effects of surface frequency for high frequency regularly inflected forms suggested that they were stored as whole forms while the absence of an analogous effect for low frequency regular words suggested that they were likely to be decomposed (Alegre & Gordon, 1999). Limitations exist, however, because morpheme analysis can entail costs as well as benefits or null effects. For example in Finnish, decision latencies are slowed when processing morphologically complex nouns (i.e., inflected nouns), as compared to monomorphemic nouns (Laine, Vainio & Hyona, 1999). Further, Italian stems that combine with many inflectional affixes elicit slower decision latencies than those that combine with fewer (Traficante & Burani, 2003). Similarly, in some nonword contexts, latencies to lower frequency English words with more frequent base morphemes are harder to recognize than are words with less frequency base morphemes (Taft, 2004). Finally, competition between present and past tense inflected forms of the same verb has been documented for regulars as well as for irregulars (see Baayen, this volume). In fact, with more refined analytic techniques, frequency effects can be detected for regularly inflected forms over a full range of frequencies thereby invalidating claims for a switch in processing options as surface frequency increases (Wurm & Baayen, 2005). In contrast to traditional accounts with processing options that reveal either effects of surface or of morpheme frequency, these findings reveal conjoint effects of both measures and, therefore, are more consistent with models that

16


permit complex and varied interactions between whole word and analytic processes. 4.2. Modulation of facilitation due to frequency of derivational relatives and their components Like effects of surface and base morpheme frequency for single words, patterns of facilitation to target decision latencies when prime and target are morphologically related provide a window on morphological processing. Once again, the failure to observe effects of constituent morphemic structure traditionally is interpreted as evidence in support of the whole word processing option and effects of constituent morphemic structure reflect analytic processing. In contrast to high frequency semantically related primes that tend to produce greater target facilitation than do lower frequency primes, higher frequency morphologically related words generally produce less facilitation than do low (Meunier & Segui, 1999, 2001; Raveh 2002). Whereas attenuated facilitation could be interpreted as support for whole word processing of the prime, differences across prime types in forward masked facilitation fail to arise when targets are very high (600 per million) in frequency (Giraudo & Grainger, 2000). Stated simply, target surface frequency can modulate the activation that occurs within the lexicon and limit the priming potential of any particular prime, either a semantic associate or a member of the target’s morphological family. Although whole word processing of the prime is one account of attenuated facilitation, accounts that focus on magnitudes of facilitation without consideration of baselines loose much of their foothold when different prime-target relations are examined on different sets of prime-target pairs. In addition to properties of the base morpheme and target surface frequency, however, properties of the affix also influence morphological facilitation in a priming task and, consistent with a traditional processing framework, these effects are less amenable to an interpretation that entails a switch between independent processing alternatives. At a 250 ms SOA (Feldman, under review), target (HUNT) decision latencies were faster when specified by underlining in a low frequency morphologically complex form related by derivation (HUNTRESS), than in a higher frequency one (HUNTER). In addition, productivity of the affix influenced decision latencies such that decision latencies for targets after morphologically complex source words became more like the stem identity (HUNT) condition (i.e. smaller difference) as affix numerosity


17

increased. Accordingly, the difference between target decision latencies for ACTIVE (low affix frequency) relative to ACT is larger than the difference between TEACHER (high affix frequency) and TEACH. Effects of affix numerosity are most salient in lower frequency words, which suggests that a property of the affix component is easier to detect in the context of whole words that are low in frequency. Here, routes fail to operate independently. Therefore, this pattern again calls into question the validity of interpreting the absence of a morphological effect (e.g., the failure to detect differential morphological facilitation when target frequency is high and recognition latencies are fast) as evidence of whole word processing. In Hebrew, where words are composed of a root and a word pattern, repetition of verbal (Deutsch, Frost & Forster, 1998), but not nominal (Frost et al., 1997) word patterns produces facilitation. One interpretation draws on insights about affix homonymity, specifically evidence that repetition of homographic affixes failed to produce forward masked facilitation such that homogeneous French pairs such as BRISEUR-AMUSEUR with agentive EUR showed facilitation whereas non homogeneous pairs such as LARGEUR-AMUSEUR did not (Kazanina & Tremblay, 2006). Because the Hebrew materials were not included, it is not clear whether the nominal patterns in Frost et al. (1997) were semantically ambiguous and performed two or more functions. For example, when the –a-a- word pattern is infixed into a C-C-C root, it can serve either nominally (GaMaD, dwarf, BDaVaR, thing; GaMaL, camel) as an adjective (e.g., KaTaN, small) or as a verb (KaTaV, he wrote). Historically, the vowels of the word patterns were distinct, but the differences have disappeared in modern Hebrew. The implication is that affix homonymity may have contributed to the failure to detect noun pattern facilitation in Hebrew (see also Feldman et al. 1995). Further, repetition of different but homonymous word patterns in prime and target may be a factor when morphologically unrelated, but orthographically similar pairs in Hebrew fail to influence recognition (Frost et al., 2005). To our knowledge, effects on morphological facilitation of affix homonymity in general, and effects of word pattern homonymity in particular, have not yet been systematically investigated in Hebrew. At this point, therefore, it seems premature to interpret an absence of morphological facilitation that potentially is associated with homonymity as evidence of a cross language difference with respect to where morphological processing does and does not occur.

18


4.3. Facilitation due to regular vs. irregular inflectional relatedness: One mechanism or two? Formulation of irregularly inflected forms in English typically entails stem change (HOPPED vs. RAN), but can also entail irregular inflection (TOASTED VS. BURNT). Stem change may be less characteristic of irregularity in languages such as Hebrew (Berent, Pinker & Shimron, 2002) and Greek (Jarema, Feldman & Perlak, 2004). One of the most frequently investigated themes in the domain of morphology is whether morphologically related primes formed by regular inflection are recognized by the same processing mechanism as are irregulars, or whether irregular forms require a whole word processing mechanism. In priming tasks, magnitudes of facilitation that differ significantly from the baseline after regular primes in conjunction with nonsignificant facilitation after irregular primes, often are interpreted as evidence of competing processes. Thus, regular forms are decomposed into stem + affix and reactivation of the base morpheme in prime and then target produces facilitation. By contrast irregular forms are represented as wholes in associative memory and activation between entries produces weaker facilitation. Notably, differences of differences in facilitation typically are not tested statistically. For example, research conducted on Hebrew with its infixing structure, as compared to the affixing structure of English, reports forward masked morphological facilitation for regular three consonant roots, but not for irregular forms (i.e., weak roots) that infix the word pattern into a two consonant root. Statistical comparisons of the two were never reported, however (Velan, Frost, Deutsch, & Plaut, 2005). One factor that complicates cross language comparisons of processing for regular and irregular inflectionally related pairs is the construction of baselines to calculate the magnitude of morphological facilitation. Some studies determine the size of the effect by comparing morphologically related word pairs to an (orthographically and semantically) unrelated baseline condition (e.g., Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994), whereas others compute the effect by comparing related items to an orthographically related (and semantically unrelated) condition (e.g., Forster & Davis, 1984; Frost, Deutsch, & Forster, 2000; Frost et al. 1997). As delineated above, orthographic similarity of the prime can inhibit the processing of the target. Therefore, it is possible that comparing latencies after a morphologically related to


19

latencies after an orthographically related prime artificially magnifies the difference by encompassing a combination of both morphological facilitation and orthographic inhibition. On the other hand, regular and irregularly inflected forms tend to differ in their similarity to the base morpheme and that variation should be controlled rather than neglected as is the case with an unrelated baseline. Pastizzo and Feldman (2002) compared forward masked English target decision latencies after unrelated, orthographically similar and morphologically related primes for regular and irregular targets matched on frequency and number of neighbors. Over all target types, decision latencies after orthographically similar primes and unrelated forward masked primes did not differ significantly. Planned comparisons indicated that morphologically related primes significantly reduced response latencies for regular prime-target pairs such as HATCHEDHATCH pairs. However, due to nonsignificant orthographic inhibition, facilitation was more reliable when assessed relative to the orthographic baseline than an unrelated baseline. Choice of orthographic vs. unrelated baseline did not alter the assessment of morphological facilitation for irregular and formally dissimilar TAUGHT-TEACH type items. As occurs for irregular verbs in Hebrew, neither comparison was significant. Crucially, for native speakers of English the presence of significant facilitation relative to an orthographic baseline failed to differentiate regularly from irregularly inflected but formally similar verb pairs such that FELL-FALL type pairs as well as HATCHED-HATCH pairs produced facilitation. Note also, however, that morphological facilitation for the same irregular and formally similar FELL-FALL type items was significant when assessed relative to the orthographic (FILL-FALL) but not relative to the unrelated (PAIR-FALL) baseline. In a context where magnitudes of facilitation vary in a graded rather than an all-or-none manner, a focus restricted to the presence or absence of significant facilitation generally constitutes an inadequate portrayal of morphological processing. Obviously, comparisons become more sensitive and the potential to detect differences in the magnitude of facilitation is enhanced if regular and irregular morphologically related primes can precede the same target (Feldman & Fowler, 1987; Fowler, Napps & Feldman, 1985). Alternatively, differences of differences can be tested statistically where reports of a significant interaction of verb type (regular vs. irregular) by prime type (morphological vs. unrelated) provide support for different processing mechanisms for regular and irregular inflection.

20


In sum, the absence of forward masked facilitation for a subset of irregulars with attenuated form overlap arises both in morphologically impoverished English, and in morphologically rich Hebrew. Moreover in English, the ubiquity of item-specific (surface frequency) as well as base morpheme frequency contributions and the comparability of magnitudes of cross modal facilitation for irregulars (GROWN-GROW) matched to regulars (GUIDED-GUIDE) on degree of form overlap (Basnight-Brown, Chen, Shu, Kostić & Feldman, 2006) suggest that for the recognition of regular and irregular verbs, similarities predominate over differences. In our view, neither well-designed studies that contrast morphological facilitation over languages nor studies that contrast morphological facilitation over regularity provide convincing evidence of a processing dichotomy. 4.4. Under additive effects of form and meaning vs. morphological relatedness Further insights into morphological processing derive from comparing orthographic and semantic priming effects with morphological effects within the same study, and interpretations focus on whether morphological facilitation is greater than the sum of the magnitudes of semantic and form-based similarity. Across many languages, experiments have included comparisons of morphological with either semantic or orthographic similarity and outcomes within a common methodology fail to diverge cross languages. In one such study (Feldman, 2000), critical pairs shared morphological (e.g., VOWED-VOW) as well as semantic (e.g., PLEDGE-VOW) and orthographic (e.g., VOWEL-VOW) relatedness. Morphological and semantic pairs were equated by ratings for semantic similarity, and morphological and orthographic pairs were equated for letter overlap between prime and target. Crucially, the same targets were counterbalanced over all types of primes. In the lexical decision task, when there was no mask and both prime and target appeared visually, morphological facilitation was evident over a range of prime-target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) and effects of orthographic similarity (when primes had lower frequencies than their targets) tended to be numerically facilitatory or absent at SOAs of 32 and 66 ms, and became inhibitory at longer SOAs. Although semantic relatedness produced less facilitation than did morphological relatedness, both dimensions showed a similar increase with SOA. Most important, the magnitude of


21

morphological facilitation was significantly greater than the sum of the effects of shared form and shared semantics in isolation. Some theorists take under additive effects of form and meaning relative to morphological relatedness to mean that morphological structure is represented independently of form and meaning (Longtin, Segui, & Halle, 2003; Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004), whereas for others it means that morphological effects arise from a more complex convergence of form and semantics (Plaut et al., 1996; Rueckl et al., 1997). This is another domain where numerical interactions often fail to reach statistical significance but graded differences proliferate both in priming outcomes and in degree of form or semantic similarity between prime and target. Insofar as form and semantic effects fail to differ across languages when task and target properties are controlled, there is little justification to anticipate that their underadditivity varies across languages. 4.5. Does word-internal patterning of morphemes influence morphological processing? Accounts of morphological processing tend to focus on the base morpheme or root, but there is variation in how base morphemes combine with affixes to form a word and this combinatorial processes also may influence processing. In Hebrew, base morphemes generally occur with a word pattern and it is possible, therefore, that its distinctive word structure, with infixing of one morpheme within another, serves to alter aspects of morphological processing. It can be argued that apart from infixing, word structure in Hebrew is similar to that in languages such as Spanish and Serbian, insofar as words other than masculine singular forms (that have no affix), necessarily append an affix to a stem (or base morpheme) so that the typical stem seldom appears in isolation. The implication is that noun and verb targets in Hebrew, but also Spanish and Serbian, always are composed of at least two morphemes and contrast with targets in English that can be monomorphemic. To the extent that these situations are analogous, one can ask whether its base plus word pattern structure renders recognition in Hebrew different from languages where base morphemes are free and can appear without an affix. One clue to processing of stem-plus-affix combinations derives from studies with homographic stem morphemes. If morphemic stems are processed orthographically but not semantically at early stages of recognition, then prime target pairs that share unrelated but homographic stems should show facilitation. Homographic stem inhibition has been

22


documented in Italian for PORTARE (‘carry’) - PORTE (‘door’) type pairs when processing time for the prime is relatively unconstrained (Laudanna, Badecker, & Caramazza, 1992), as well as in Spanish (Allen & Badecker, 2002). However the Italian results do not generalize from verbs to nouns (Laudanna, Voghera & Gazzellini, 2002)) and the Spanish results have been difficult to replicate (see also Carreiras, Perdomo & Mesguer, 2005). In fact, after forward masked homographic stems [e.g., SER in SERIO (serious man), SERIA (serious woman) vs. SERIE (series, serial)] at an SOA of 66 ms, magnitudes of facilitation were 33 ms greater after morphological than orthographic primes (Duñabeitia, Perea, Gutiérrez, Mena, & Carreiras, in press). Here, stems were homographic so that form similarity was fully matched. Nevertheless, even under forward masked presentation conditions, stems were not processed in isolation from their affix. Accordingly, differences in forward masked facilitation across stem plus affix combinations can be interpreted as early effects of mismatching semantics between formally similar prime and target. Further, when the same base morpheme appears in two words so that the words truly are morphologically related, words can differ in the degree of semantics they share with the base morpheme even though only affixes differ. For example, the stem FIX appears to share more meaning with its morphological family member and relative FIXABLE (where semantic meaning is transparent), than with its relative FIXTURE (where the semantic meaning is opaque). Similarly in Hebrew, the same morpheme (SH-L-X) underlies SHaLaX (to send), NiSHKaX (to be extended) and SHaLiaX (emissary) although some assert that semantic diversity within a family tends to be greater in Hebrew than in other languages. Manipulations of semantic transparency between members of a morphological family have been the focus of much recent work on morphological priming. Generally, the results reveal larger magnitudes of facilitation for transparent as compared to opaque items, although this difference often is nonsignificant when prime presentation is very brief and processing time is limited. Failure to detect an effect of semantic transparency among morphological relatives under forward masked conditions with short SOA durations has been replicated in several languages; English (Feldman, Soltano, Pastizzo, & Francis 2004; Forster & Azuma, 2000; Rastle et al., 2000, 2005), Hebrew (Frost et al., 1997, 2005), Bulgarian (Nikolova & Jarema, 2002), French (Longtin et al., 2003) and Dutch (Diependaele, Sandra, & Grainger, 2005). Nonetheless, across other presentation formats that are not necessarily restricted to


23

early phases of processing, outcomes suggest that morphological processing can be sensitive to semantic similarity, even in languages that are highly inflected or morphologically rich in derivation, such as Serbian and Hebrew (Bentin & Feldman, 1990; Feldman, Barac-Cikoja, & Kostić, 2002; Frost, Deutsch, Gilboa, Tannenbaum, & Marslen-Wilson, 2000; Frost et al., 1997). Crucial in investigations of the interaction between semantics and morphology is the time course of morphological processing based on manipulations of SOA within a task (Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2005; Feldman et al., 2004; Rastle et al., 2000). A second factor that influences semantic transparency, discussed in the next section, focuses on list composition. The results from time course studies in English (Feldman et al., 2004) reveal significant morphological facilitation for transparent items that is generally consistent across all SOA durations. In contrast, facilitation after opaque primes occurs only at the shortest SOA and likely reflects similarity of form in the absence of elaborated semantics. Revealingly, semantic facilitation likewise only occurs at the longest SOA, when presentation durations make primes visible. Collectively, the pattern invites a distinction between morphological-form effects that arise early, and morphological-semantic effects that tend to emerge later in the process. The purported distinction based on time course between early form contributions and later semantic contributions is not specific to English. In fact, it is characteristic of Arabic, another Semitic language (Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2005) as well as Serbian, another highly inflected language (Feldman et al. 2002). Effects of homography and of semantic transparency of the base morpheme implicate a role for the affix in morphological processing. To elaborate, the particular combinational probability of a stem plus affix combination (Baayen, this volume) guides processing and affects patterns of facilitation in a manner that is not easily accommodated by traditional accounts where form-based analysis of the base morpheme and semantically influenced whole word processing are independent options. Undeniably, the finding that transparent and opaque facilitation typically do not differ significantly under highly constrained conditions (forward masked with the shortest SOA length), has profound implications for claims about the way in which morphology is represented within a language and perhaps invites comparisons across languages with infixing and affixing structures. Consistent with Forster and Azuma’s (2000) characterization of the forward masked lexical decision task, Rastle et al. (2005) have suggested that the similar outcome for semantically

24


transparent and opaque words occurs because the earliest stage of word recognition is more dependent on form, and less dependent on semantics (see also Longtin et al., 2003). By this account, morphological processing does not reflect conjoint effects of form and meaning and influences of semantics on early morphological processing are not anticipated. 4.6. The influence of list composition on semantic processing In addition to properties of the target and its morphological relatives, several experimental factors pertaining to list composition and the construction of word and nonword filler trials can modulate the magnitude of morphological, as well as semantic, forward masked facilitation. In the same way, the impact of these manipulations has implications for our understanding of early morphological processing. The relatedness proportion (RP), or proportion of related word trials relative to all word-word pairs, is a factor that can influence the magnitude of facilitation in semantic priming tasks (see Neely, Keefe & Ross, 1989). Similarly, in the morphological priming task, an increase in RP from .50 to .75 enhanced morphological facilitation for Dutch words (Drews & Zwitserlood, 1995). The number and composition of filler items also are relevant. Specifically, the inclusion of identity trials (e.g., ANT-ANT) appears to increase overall semantic activation (Bodner & Masson, 2003; Feldman & Basnight-Brown, submitted). As described above, it is rare to observe effects of semantic similarity in the forward masked priming task; however, the inclusion of pseudohomophones (e.g., CERE, DAIR) or identity fillers (Bodner & Masson, 2003; Joordens & Becker, 1997) do appear to increase semantic activation at early stages of processing. In support of this claim, when proportion of orthographically similar word-word and word-nonword pairs was matched so that orthographic similarity was not a valid predictor of lexicality, Feldman and Basnight-Brown (submitted) observed a significant increase in semantic facilitation (a change from -4 ms to +23 ms) for the same set of targets when identity filler word pairs replaced filler items that were a mix of orthographically, semantically, and morphologically related and RP was held constant. More importantly, the change in list composition significantly increased the magnitude of morphological facilitation (+25 ms to +53 ms). Of more relevance, the influence of semantics early in morphological processing was examined recently in word pairs where the degree of semantic transparency and target neighborhood size were mani-


25

pulated (Feldman, Basnight-Brown, & Kanai, submitted). Half of all word nonword pairs consisted of pseudohomophones (e.g., DAIRYDAIR; GROCER-GROCE). Each target (e.g., FIX) was paired with a transparent morphological relative (FIXABLE), a partially transparent morphological relative (FIXTURE), an orthographically unrelated word (FITNESS), and an unrelated word (EVASIVE). Large and small N targets were matched on frequency (60 (SD=74) vs. 73 (SD=74) per Table 2. Forward masked decision latencies for targets with small and large orthographic neighborhoods after morphologically transparent, partially transparent, orthographically similar and unrelated primes.

Small N

TRANS 601

PRIME TYPE PARTIAL ORTHO 615 623

UR 632

Large N

597

592

611

628

million) but differed on neighborhood size and length such that small neighborhoods had an average size of 1 (SD=1.1) and a length of 5.7 (SD=.9), and large neighborhoods of 11 (SD=3.9) and a length of 4.1 (SD=.6). The semantic relationship between the transparent, partially transparent, and opaque items differed significantly both by ratings of semantic relatedness and by LSA values and differences were matched across large and small N targets (Landauer, Foltz, & Laham, 1998). The results revealed a significant interaction between neighborhood size (and length) and prime type. In the context of pseudohomophone fillers as well as identity trials that emphasized a word’s orthographic structure, latencies to targets with large neighborhoods, were significantly slower after orthographic as compared to the unrelated primes, and latencies after transparent and partially transparent primes did not differ (see Table 2). These large N results are reminiscent of findings in Hebrew; there was no effect of semantic transparency among morphological relatives and no form facilitation. Most notable was that for targets from small neighborhoods, response latencies after transparent and partially transparent primes significantly differed one from another. In addition to effects of transparency that are more salient when neighborhood size is small, one further implication of these findings is that it is premature to interpret differences in morphological processing between Hebrew and other languages with respect to the absence of an effect of semantic transparency as a reflection of the unique root plus

26


word pattern structure of Hebrew where base morphemes for nouns and verbs fail to appear in isolation. Additional, albeit indirect, support for the non-distinctiveness of Hebrew morphological processing derives from a study in English, where primes as well as targets were affixed (Feldman et al., 2004). Magnitudes of facilitation for affixed targets relative to an unrelated baseline failed to differ significantly for transparent (ACCORDING-ACCORDANCE) and opaque (ACCORDIONACCORDANCE) word pairs both at an unmasked SOA of 48 ms (14 and 20 ms, respectively) and at a forward masked SOA of 83 ms (22 ms and 15 ms, respectively). Moreover, similar structures exist in Spanish where affixes are concatenated to stems to form morphologically complex words and there magnitudes of forward masked morphological facilitation at a 66 ms SOA were greater for transparent (46 ms) than for opaque (19 ms) prime target pairs (Carreiras, Duñabeitia, & Perea, 2006). Curiously in Basque, however, where words tend to be longer due to agglutinating word formation processes, under the same conditions target facilitation after opaque and transparent prime pairs failed to differ (Carreiras et al., 2006). Collectively, morphological facilitation in forward masked priming is a robust finding, where the size of the effect depends on several factors including target frequency, family size, neighborhood size and length, SOA, RP, type and proportion of filler items, and structure of baseline items. Introducing different targets for each type of relatedness necessarily compromises the potential to detect an effect of opaque vs. transparent prime type. Effects of a target’s morphological family size and of its orthographic neighborhood size have been documented across several languages and are consistent with accounts that emphasize strength of mappings between form (orthographic, phonological) and semantic codes and interpret morphological processing in terms of the systematicity with which similar form is predictive of similar meaning. Likewise, effects of a target’s orthographic neighborhood have been documented where effects likely reflect competition between orthographically similar but semantically dissimilar forms. Stated generally, a large morphological family size as well as a large orthographic neighborhood render effects of morphological prime type more difficult to detect. In sum, as one moves away from the dichotomous processing framework based on analytic form and whole word semantic routes that work independently, and considers seriously graded magnitudes of facilitation as a function of target type and degree of similarity between


27

prime and target, the case for differing modes of processing across languages is not as compelling as once asserted. Specifically, magnitudes of forward masked morphological facilitation vary with degree of form similarity between prime and target and, in contexts that foster semantic analysis, they can be influenced by the semantic transparency of the shared base morpheme. Outcomes seem to depend more on methodological variation than on language, however. 5. Conclusions We have asked whether the prevalence of whole word and analytic processing as revealed by the forward masked priming task varies across languages that differ with respect to the mapping of orthographic with either phonological or morphological structure. In the orthographic domain as a rule, primes that are similar to the target that follows in form tend to slow decision latencies and this occurs across a variety of languages and definitions of orthographic similarity. Factors that influence the effect of orthographic similarity between prime and target under forward masked presentation conditions encompass number of neighbors, length and frequency of target, lexicality of the prime, composition of filler items, as well as task and presentation conditions for the prime. Our assessment is that variation in the number of neighbors and length of targets across languages may have created the illusion of systematic differences between Indo-European and Semitic languages with respect to the role of form similarity in visual word recognition. Among languages with alphabetic writing systems, orthographic depth and the accuracy of predicting the phonology from orthographic form likewise can vary. Word frequency and semantic relatedness provide measures of lexical processing and results in naming studies sometimes diverge across languages with differing orthographic depth. Here, variation across word types potentially provides insights into cross language variation. By one account, the presence of a whole word frequency effect is a marker for lexical or whole word processes and a frequency effect that is attenuated or absent when the orthographic specification of phonology is accurate and otherwise complete attests to variability in whole word recognition processes across languages. However, a more universal approach also considers the specifics of the task and any limits on processing that may influence production of a response. Collectively, without consideration of general processing

28


constraints within a language and a task, speculation about potential language specific patterning due to orthographic depth or other factors is of limited value. Item specific as well as base morpheme frequency effects have been documented for regularly and irregularly inflected single words. Thus, effects of various morphologically derived frequency measures should not be interpreted as a reliable indicator that opposing whole word processing is absent. Further, magnitudes of morphological facilitation vary with degree of semantic and of form similarity between prime and target as well as with a target’s density (or number of neighbors) and its number of morphological relatives. Although form (dis)similarity and irregularity tend to covary, when degree of form similarity is high as for GROWN-GROW type pairs, similarities continue to predominate over differences in priming by regulars and irregulars (Basnight-Brown et al., 2006). Finally, the finding that morphological facilitation in English is generally greater than the combined effects of orthographic and semantic similarity (Feldman et al., 2004; Rastle et al., 2000), demonstrates that morphological processing is not a simple byproduct of semantic and orthographic processing. Nevertheless, it remains plausible that morphological effects reflect a more complex interaction between form and meaning. Languages differ in their tendency to form new words by creating new combinations of morphemes and base morphemes can vary in a graded manner with respect to their degree of transparency within morphologically complex forms. Semantic influences on morphological facilitation due to transparency are robust and easy to detect at SOAs of 250 or longer in Hebrew (e.g., Bentin & Feldman, 1990; Frost et al., 2000) and in Serbian (Feldman et al., 2003), two morphologically rich languages, as well as in English (Feldman & Basnight-Brown, submitted; Marslen-Wilson et al., 1994), although SOA seems to be a limiting factor (Feldman & Soltano, 1999; Raveh, 2002; Raveh & Rueckl, 2000). Nonetheless, high proportions of related prime-target pairs (RP) and of identity trials, as well as nonword trials with a particularly word-like structure due to DAIRY-DAIR type homophony, each serve to augment magnitudes of forward masked morphological facilitation, thereby permitting effects of semantic transparency among morphologically related pairs to emerge. Evidently, in Indo-European, as well as in Semitic languages, early aspects of morphological processing are not limited to semantically similar prime-target pairs. More importantly, benefits of semantic similarity for morphologically related pairs do arise


29

under forward masked presentation conditions and call into question a purely ortho-morphological stage of processing. In conclusion, graded effects of semantic transparency emerge across as well as within languages and therefore fail to provide convincing evidence of cross language variation. Future research likely will continue to examine orthographic, semantic and morphological processing in diverse languages, both alphabetic and non-alphabetic. Attention to graded effects invites a focus on whether various weightings of a common set of methodological factors and word properties including those identified in the current chapter (i.e., neighborhood size, family size, systematic manipulations of semantic transparency between items, and list composition) are adequate to account for any variation in word recognition processes across languages. It is only once a common set of factors is identified and empirically investigated in languages with diverse structures that one can accurately assess whether and how cross language differences in word recognition emerges. Based on the current discussion and on the empirical data to date, it appears that the same factors function throughout and that processing is more similar than different across IndoEuropean and Semitic languages. References Alegre, M., & Gordon, P. (1999). Rule based versus associative processes in derivational morphology. Brain and Language, 68, 347354. Andrews, S. (1989). Frequency and neighborhood effects on lexical access: Activation or search? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 802-815. Andrews, S. (1992). Frequency and neighborhood effects on lexical access: Lexical similarity or orthographic redundancy? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 234254. Arduino, L. S. & Burani, C. (2004). Neighborhood effects on nonword visual processing in a language with a shallow orthography. Journal of Psycholinguisitc Research, 33, 75-95. Baayen, R. H., (this volume). Storage and computation in the mental lexicon.

30


Baayen, R. H., Dijkstra, T., & Schreuder, R. (1997). Morphological influences on the recognition of monosyllabic monomorphemic words. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 94-117. Baayen, R. H., Feldman, L. B., & Schreuder, R. (2006). Morphological influences on the recognition of monosyllabic monomorphemic words. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 496-117. Baluch, B. & Besner, D. (1991). Visual word recognition: Evidence for strategic control of lexical and nonlexical routines in oral reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 17, 644-652. Barca, L., Burani, C, & Arduino, L.S. (2002). Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 34, 424-434. Basnight-Brown, D., Chen, H., Shu, H., Kostić, A. & Feldman, L. B. (under review). Monolingual and Bilingual Recognition of Regular and Irregular English Verbs: Does Sensitivity to Word Form Vary with Language Experience? Bentin, S., & Feldman, L. B. (1990). The contribution of morphological and semantic relatedness to repetition priming at long and short lags: Evidence from Hebrew. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42A, 693-711 Berent, I., Pinker, S., & Shimron, J. (2002). The nature of regularity and irregularity: evidence from Hebrew nominal inflection. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31, 459-502. Bertram, R., Laine, M., & Karvinen, K. (1999). The interplay of word formation type, affixal homonymy and productivity in lexical processing: Evidence from a morphologically rich Language. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Bertram, R., Laine, M., Baayen, R., Schreuder, H., & Hyona, J. (2000a). Affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage, even with inflected words, even in a morphologically rich language. Cognition, 74, 13-25. Bertram, R., Schreuder, R., Baayen, R. H. (2000). The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: the role of word formation type affixal homonymy, and productivity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 26, 419511.


31

Bodner, G. E., & Masson, M. E. J. (2003). Beyond spreading activation: An influence of relatedness proportion on masked semantic priming. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 10, 645-652. Boudelaa, S., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2005). Discontinuous morphology in time: Incremental masked priming in Arabic. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 207-260. Burani, C., & Thornton, A. M. (2003). The interplay of root, suffix and whole-word frequency in processing derived words R. H. Baayen & R. Schreuder (Eds.), Morphological Structure in Language Processing. 157-207. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Carreiras, M., Duñabeitia, J.A., & Perea, M. (2006, August). Effects of transparency on morphological decomposition. Poster presented at. AMLaP 2006, Twelfth Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, NIjmegan, NL. Coltheart, M., Davelaar, E., Jonasson, J.T., & Besner, D. (1977). Access to the internal lexicon. In S. Dornic (Ed.), Attention and performance VI (pp. 535-555). New York: Academic Press. Davis, C.J., & Lupker, S.J. (2006). Masked inhibitory priming in English: Evidence for lexical inhibition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32, 668-687. Deutsch, A., Frost, R., & Forster, K.I. (1998). Verbs and Nouns Are Organized and Accessed Differently in the Mental Lexicon: Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 24(5), 1238-1255. De Moor, W., & Brysbaert, M. (2000). Neighborhood frequency effects when primes and targets are of different lengths. Psychological Research, 63, 159-162. Diependaele, K., Sandra, D., & Grainger, J. (2005). Masked cross-modal morphological priming: Unraveling morpho-orthographic and morphosemantic influences in early word recognition. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 75-114. Drews, E., & Zwitserlood, P. (1995). Morphological and orthographic similarity in visual word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 1098-1116.

32


Duñabeitia, J.A., Perea, M., Gutiérrez, E., Mena, Y., & Carreiras, M. (in press). Priming morfológico: algo más que priming ortográfico. Anuario de Psicología. Feldman, L. B. (under review). Lexical influences on morphological processing: Effects of low surface frequency on morphological family size. Feldman, L.B. (2000). Are morphological effects distinguishable from the effects of shared meaning and shared form? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Language, 26 (6), 1431-1444. Feldman, L.B., Barac-Cikoja, D., & Kostić, A. (2002). Semantic aspects of morphological processing: Transparency effects in Serbian. Memory and Cognition, 30, 629-636. Feldman, L. B., Basnight-Brown, D. M. & Kanai, Y. (submitted). Parallels between forward masked semantic and morphological facilitation: Influence of list context invites a computational account of morphological processing. Feldman, L.B., & Basnight-Brown, D.M. (submitted). Effects of semantic transparency in the forward masked morphological priming task depend on orthographic neighborhood size. Feldman, L. B., & Bentin, S. (1994). Morphological analysis of disrupted morphemes: Evidence from Hebrew. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47A, 407-435. Feldman, L. B., & Fowler, C. A. (1987). The inflected noun system in Serbo-Croatian: Lexical representation of morphological structure. Memory and Cognition, 15, 1-12. Feldman, L. B., Frost, R. & Pnini, T. (1995). Decomposing words into their constituent morphemes: Evidence from English and Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 21, 947-960. Feldman, L. B., and Moskovljević, J. (1987). Repetition priming is not purely episodic in origin. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 13, 573-581. Feldman, L. B., Jarema, G., Perlak D., and Pastizzo, M. J. (2004). Defining orthographic neighbors in a highly inflected language: Do


33

neighborhoods include inflected forms? In G. Libben and K. Nault (Eds.) Mental Lexicon Working Papers. 109-123. Feldman, L. B. and Pastizzo, M. J. (2003). Morphological facilitation: The role of semantic transparency and family size. In R. H. Baayen and R. Schreuder (Eds.). Morphological Structure in Language Processing. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. Feldman, L. B., and Soltano, E. G. (1999). Morphological priming: The role of prime duration, semantic transparency and affix position. Brain and Language, 60, 33-39. doi:10.1006/brln.1999.2077. Feldman, L. B., Soltano, E.G., Pastizzo, M., & Francis, S. E. (2004). What do graded effects of semantic transparency reveal about morphological processing? Brain and Language, 90, 17-30. Ferrand, L., & Grainger, J. (1992). Phonology and orthography in visual word recognition: Evidence from masked nonword priming. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 45A, 353-372. Ford, M., Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Davis, M. H. (2003). Morphology and frequency: contrasting methodologies. In Baayen, R. H. and Schreuder R. (Eds.), Morphological Structure in Language Processing. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. pp. 89-124. Forster, K.I., & Azuma, T. (2000). Masked priming for prefixed words with bound stems: Does submit prime permit? Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 539-561. Forster, K.I., & Davis, C. (1984). Repetition priming and frequency attenuation in lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10, 680-698. Forster, K.I., Davis, C., Schoknecht, C., & Carter, R. (1987). Masked priming with graphemically related forms: Repetition or partial activation? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39A, 211251. Forster, K. I., & Shen, D. (1996). No enemies in the neighborhood: Absence of inhibitory neighborhood effects in lexical decision and semantic categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22, 696–713. Forster, K.I., & Veres, C. (1998). The prime lexicality effect: Formpriming as a function of prime awareness, lexical status, and

34


discrimination difficulty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 24, 498-514. Frost, R., (1994). Prelexical and postlexical strategies in reading: Evidence from a deep and a shallow orthography. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20 116129. Frost, R., Deutsch, A., & Forster, K.I. (2000). Decomposing Morphologically Complex Words in a Nonlinear Morphology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 26(3), 751-765.. Frost, R., Deutsch, A., Gilboa, O., Tannenbaum, M., & Marslen-Wilson, W.D. (2000). Morphological priming: Dissociation of phonological, semantic, and morphological factors. Memory and Cognition, 28, 1277-1288. Frost, R., Forster, K.I., & Deutsch, A. (1997). What can we learn from the morphology of Hebrew? A masked priming investigation of morphological representation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23 (4), 829-256. Frost, R., & Katz, L. (1992). Orthography, Phonology, Morphology and Meaning. Oxford, England: North Holland. Frost, R., Katz, L., & Bentin, S. (1987). Strategies for visual word recognition and orthographical depth: A multilingual comparison. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 13, 104-115. Frost, R., Kugler, T., Deutsch, A., & Forster, K. I. (2005). Orthographic structure versus morphological structure: Principles of lexical organization in a given language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 1293-1326. Fowler, C. A., Napps, S. E., and Feldman, L. B. (1985). Relations among regular and irregular morphologically-related words in the lexicon as revealed by repetition priming. Memory and Cognition, 13, 241-255. Giraudo, H., & Grainger, J. (2000). Effects of prime word frequency and cumulative root frequency in masked morphological priming. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 421-444.


35

Grainger, J., & Ferrand, L. (1994). Phonology and orthography in visual word recogntion: Effects of masked homophone primes. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 218-233. Harm, M. W., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1999). Phonology, reading acquisition, and dyslexia: Insights from connectionist models. Psychological Review, 106, 491-528. Harm, M. W., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2004). Computing the meanings of words in reading: Cooperative division of labor between visual and phonological processes. Psychological Review, 111, 662-720. Janack, T., Pastizzo, M.J., & Feldman, L.B. (2004). When orthographic neighbors fail to facilitate. Brain and Language, 90, 441-452. Jarema, G., Feldman, L.B. & Perlak, D. (2004). Defining regularity: Does degree of phonological and orthographic similarity among Polish relatives influence morphological processing? In G. Libben and K. Nault (Eds.) Mental Lexicon Working Papers. 91-108. Johnson, N.F., & Pugh, K.R. (1994). A cohort model of visual word recognition. Cognitive Pyschology, 26, 240-346. Joordens, S., & Becker, S. (1997). The long and short of semantic priming effects in lexical decision. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 23, 1083-1105. Katz, L., & Feldman, L. B. (1983). Relation between pronunciation and recognition of printed words in deep and shallow orthographies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 9, 157-166. Kazanina, N., & Tremblay, M.-C., (2006). Representiaon of homonym bound affixes in the mental lexicon. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the Mental Lexicon. Montreal, Canada. Kostić, A. (1995). Informational load constraints on processing inflected morphology. In L. B. Feldman (Ed.), Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 317-344). Hillsdale, NJ. Erlbaum. Laine, M., Vainio, S., & Hyona, J. (1999). Lexical access routes to nouns in a mophologically rich language. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 109-135.

36


Landauer, T.K., Foltz, P.W., & Laham, D. (1998). Introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes, 25, pp. 259-284. http://lsa.colorado.edu/. Laudanna, A., Badecker, W., & Caramazza, A. (1992). Processing inflectional and derivational morphology. Journal of Memory & Langauge, 31, 333-348. Laudanna, A. & Burani, C. (1995). Distributional properties of derivational affixes: implications for processing. In L. B. Feldman (Ed.), Morphological Aspects of Language Processing. Hove: Erlbaum, pp. 345-364. Laudanna, A., Voghera, M., & Gazzellini, S. (2002). Lexical representations in written nouns and verbs in Italian. Brain and Language, 81, 250-263. Longtin, C.-M., Segui, J., & Halle, P. A. (2003). Morphological priming without morphological relationship. Language & Cognitive Processes, 18(3), 313-334. Lüdeling, A., & De Jong, N. (2002). German particle verbs and word formation. In N. Dehé, R. Jackendoff, A. McIntyre & S. Urban (Eds.), Explorations in Verb-Particle Constructions (pp. 315-333). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lupker S.J., Brown P., & Colombo L.   (1997). Strategic control in a naming task: Changing routes or changing deadlines? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 23, 570590. Marslen-Wilson, W., Tyler, L., Waksler, R., & Older, L. (1994). Morphology and meaning in the English mental lexicon. Psychological Review, 101, 3-33. Mathey, S., Robert, C., & Zagar, D. (2004). Neighborhood distribution interacts with orthographic priming in the lexical decision task. Language and Cognitive Processes, 19, 533-559. Meunier, F., & Segui, J. (2001). Cross-Modal Morphological Priming in French. Brain and Language, 68, 89-102. Meunier, F., & Segui, J. (1999). Morphological Priming Effect: The role of surface frequency. Brain and Language, 68, 54-60.


37

Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., Bertram, R., Häikiö, T., Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2004). Morphologically family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared to Dutch and Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Moscoso del Prado Martin, F., Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R.H. (2004). Do type and token effects reflect different mechanisms? Connectionist modelling of Dutch past-tense formation and final devoicing. Brain and Language, 90, 287-298. Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., Kostić, A., & Baayen, R.H . (2004) Putting the bits together: An information theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition, 94, 1–18. Neely, J.H., Keefe, D.E., & Ross, K.L. (1989). Semantic priming in the lexical decision task: Roles of prospective prime-generated expectancies and retrospective semantic matching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 15, 1003-1019. Pastizzo, M. J., & Feldman, L. B. (2002). Discrepancies between orthographic and unrelated baselines in masked priming undermine a decompositional account of morphological facilitation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 28, 244249. Pastizzo, M.J., & Feldman, L.B. (2004). Morphological processing: A comparison between free and bound stem facilitation. Brain and Language, 90, 31-39. Peereman, R., & Content, A. (1995). Neighborhood size effect in naming: Lexical activation and sublexical correspondences? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 409421. Perea, M., & Rosa, E. (2000). The effects of orthographic neighborhood in reading and laboratory word identification tasks: A review. Psicologica International Journal of Methodology and Experimental Psychology, 21, 327-340. Plaut, D. C., & Frost, R. (2001, November). Does morphological structure in Hebrew reduce to surface structure? Paper presented at the 42nd annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society: Orlando. FL.

38


Plaut, D. C., McClelland, J. L., Seidenberg, M., & Patterson, K. E. (1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psychological Review, 103, 56–115. Pollatsek, A., Perea, M., & Binder, K.S. (1999). The effects of neighborhood size in reading and lexical decision. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1142-1158. Rastle, K., Davis, M, H., Marslen-Wilson, W. D., & Tyler, L.K. (2000). Morphological and semantic effects in visual word recognition: A time course study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 507-537. Rastle, K., Davis, M. H., & New, B. (2004). The broth in my brother's brothel: Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11(6), 1090-1098. Raveh, M. (2002). The contribution of frequency and semantic similarity to morphological processing. Brain and Language, 3, 12-325. Raveh, M., & Rueckl, J. G. (2000). Equivalent effects of inflected and  derived primes: Long-term morphological priming in fragment completion and  lexical decision. Journal of Language and Memory, 42, 103-119. Rueckl, J.G., Mikolinski, M., Raveh, M., Miner, C.S., & Mars, F. (1997). Morphological priming, fragment completion, and connectionist networks. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 382-405. Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (1997). How complex simplex words can be. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 118–139. Sears, C. R., Hino, Y., & Lupker, J. (1995). Neighbourhood size and neighbourhood frequency effects in word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 21, 876-900. Segui, J., & Grainger, J. (1990). Priming word recognition with orthographic neighbors: Effects of relative prime target frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 65-76. Seidenberg, M. S., & McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of visual word recognition. Psychological Review, 96, 523-568.


39

Shibahara, N., Zorzi, M., Hill, M. P., Wydell, T., & Butterworth, B. (2003). Semantic effects in word naming: Evidence from English and Japanese Kanji. The quarterly journal of experimental psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 56A, 263-286. Simpson, G.B., & Kang, H. (1994). The flexible use of phonological information in word recognition in Korean, Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 319-331. Strain, E. & Herdman, C. (1999) Imageability effects in word naming: An individual differences analysis. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53, 347-359. Strain, E., Patterson, K., & Seidenberg, M.S. (1995). Semantic effects in single word naming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 1140-1154. Tabossi, P. & Laghi, L. (1992). Semantic priming in the pronunciation of words in two writing systems: Italian and English. Memory and Cognition, 20, 303-313 Taft, M. (2004). Morphological decomposition and the reverse base frequency effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57A, 745-765. Traficante, D., & & Burani, C. (2003). Visual processing of Italian verbs and adjectives: The role of the inflectional family size. In Baayen, R. H. and Schreuder R. (Eds.), Morphological Structure in Language Processing. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. pp. 45-64. Van Heuven, W., Dijkstra, T., Grainger, J., & Schriefers, H. (2001). Shared neighborhood effects in masked orthographic priming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 96-101. Velan, H., Frost, R., Deutsch, A., & Plaut, D. (2005). The processing of root morphemes in Hebrew: Contrasting localist and distributed accounts. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 169-206. Wurm, L.H., & Baayen, R.H. (2005, June). Surface frequency effects, even for suffixed inflections, below the magic number six. Paper presented at Perspectives on Morphological Processing, Cambridge, UK.

40


Zeigler, J.C., & Perry, C. (1998). No more problem’s in Coltheart’s neighborhood: Resolving neighborhood conflicts in the lexical decision task. Cognition, 68, 53-62. Zwitserlood, P. (1996). Form priming. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 589-596.