Mind the gap: semantic information constrains morphological knowledge in low SES

Morphological knowledge plays an essential role in the acquisition of literacy skills and has therefore gained increasing attention in studies involving populations with literacy deficits, such as students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Previous studies have shown that fully developed morphological representations are abstract and independent of their semantic properties. However, little is known about the morphological representations of low SES adolescents. The current study examined whether the morphological knowledge of low SES adolescents is independent of semantic properties. To this end, seventy-three Hebrew-speaking 9th graders performed two morphological tasks in a within-subject design: the priming lexical judgement task that explored morphological processing, and the morphological analogies task that assessed morphological awareness. In each task, we manipulated the level of semantic relatedness between stimuli and target words and assessed participants' accuracy and response time. The results of the priming lexical judgement task revealed significant differences between high and low SES students in both accuracy and reaction times. Among high SES students' morphological priming accelerated word identification regardless of semantic information. In contrast, among low SES students, acceleration was observed only when primes and targets shared semantically related morphemes. A similar pattern of results was found in the morphological analogies task, suggesting that low SES students’ morphological representations are still semantically dependent. These results support the role of environmental factors in low SES students’ linguistic knowledge.