Morphological sensitivity generalizes across modalities

Chen Gafni, Maya Yablonski, Michal Ben-Shachar

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

A growing body of psycholinguistic research suggests that visual and auditory word recognition involve morphological decomposition: Individual morphemes are extracted and lexically accessed when participants are presented with multi-morphemic stimuli. This view is supported by the Morpheme Interference Effect (MIE), where responses to pseudowords that contain real morphemes are slower and less accurate than responses to pseudowords that contain invented morphemes. The MIE was previously demonstrated primarily for visually presented stimuli. Here, we examine whether individuals' sensitivity to morphological structure generalizes across modalities. Participants performed a lexical decision task on visually and auditorily presented Hebrew stimuli, including pseudowords derived from real or invented roots. The results show robust MIEs in both modalities. We further show that visual MIE is consistently stronger than auditory MIE, both at the group level and at the individual level. Finally, the data show a significant correlation between visual and auditory MIEs at the individual level. These findings suggest that the MIE reflects a general sensitivity to morphological structure, which varies considerably across individuals, but is largely consistent across modalities within individuals. Thus, we propose that the MIE captures an important aspect of language processing, rather than a property specific to visual word recognition.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)37-67
Number of pages31
JournalMental Lexicon
Volume14
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 11 Nov 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© John Benjamins Publishing Company

Funding

The study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF grant 1083/17), by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF grant 2011314) and by the center for research excellence in cognitive science (I-CORE Program 51/11). M.Y. is supported in part by the Wolf foundation. We are grateful to Galit Agmon for helpful discussions. We thank Lilach Temelman-Yogev, Vered Markovich, Razan Silawi, Anat Prior, and Tami Katzir (Haifa University) for sharing the materials for the reading test. Con ꌀcit of interest: The authors declare no competing ꀀnacnial interests. The study was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF grant 1083/17), by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF grant 2011314) and by the center for research excellence in cognitive science (I-CORE Program 51/11). M.Y. is supported in part by the Wolf foundation. We are grateful to Galit Agmon for helpful discussions. We thank Lilach Temelman-Yogev, Vered Markovich, Razan Silawi, Anat Prior, and Tami Katzir (Haifa University) for sharing the materials for the reading test.

FundersFunder number
US-Israel Binational Science Foundation
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation2011314, 51/11
Wolf Foundation
Israel Science Foundation1083/17
Israeli Centers for Research Excellence
University of Haifa

    Keywords

    • Auditory word recognition
    • Derivational morphology
    • Hebrew
    • Morpheme interference effect
    • Orthographic processing
    • Root decomposition

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