Beyond decomposition: Processing zero-derivations in English visual word recognition

Journal article

Four experiments investigate the effects of covert morphological complexity during visual word recognition. Zero-derivations occur in English in which a change of word class occurs without any change in surface form (e.g., a boat-to boat; to soak-a soak). Boat is object-derived and is a basic noun (N), whereas soak is action-derived and is a basic verb (V). As the suffix {-ing} is only attached to verbs, deriving boating from its base, requires two steps, boat(N) > boat(V) > boating(V), while soaking can be derived in one step from soak(V). Experiments 1 to 3 used masked priming at different prime durations to test matched sets of one- and two-step verbs for morphological (soaking-SOAK) and semantic priming (jolting-SOAK). Experiment 4 employed a delayed-priming paradigm in which the full verb forms (soaking and boating) were primed by noun and verb phrases (a soak/to soak, a boat/to boat). In both paradigms, different morphological priming patterns were observed for one-step and two-step verbs, demonstrating that morphological processing cannot be reduced to surface form-based segmentation.

Authors: Wheeldon, L; Schuster, S; Pliatsikas, C; Malpass, D; Lahiri, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Cortex
• Volume: 116
• Pages: 176-191
• Publication date: 2018-09-18
• Acceptance date: 2018-09-04
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.09.003
• EISSN: 1973-8102
• ISSN: 0010-9452
• Pmid: 30322663
• Language: English
• Keywords: masked priming; visual word processing; derivational complexity; morphological structure; delayed priming