Resumen de Words matter more than morphemes: an investigation of masked priming effects with complex words and non-words
Hélène Giraudo, Madeleine Voga
Two morphologically related words sharing the same stem usually share, at least partly, form and meaning. Our study aims to explore the extent to which bound-stem words, e.g. facteur – facture ‘postman – bill’, whose stems do not surface as free lexical items, are accessed through their word-form. Five visual masked priming experiments with French stimuli were conducted: Exp. 1 demonstrated that words sharing the same bound-stem primed each other and this effect differed from orthographic controls. Exp. 2 showed that both bound-stems presented in isolation (e.g. fact-) and their orthographic controls (e.g. bact) facilitated target processing (e.g. facture), suggesting the presence of formal effects. Exp. 3 revealed that when complex word primes (e.g.
facteur) were directly compared to bound-stem primes (e.g. fact-) only the former produced priming effects. Finally, Exp. 4 and 5 explored the effect of non-words made of the illegal combination of a bound-stem and an existing/non existing suffix (e.g. factier/factape). While in Exp. 4 only constructed word primes facilitated target processing, Exp. 5 demonstrated that the effects observed using non-word primes were formal in nature since it did not matter whether the suffix was an existing one or not. Taken together, these results suggest that during the early stages of processing, bound-stem words are not decomposed but accessed through their word-form. They also contribute to distinguishing between morphological and formal/perceptual effects, which occur independently of factors such as lexicality of primes or their morphological structure, and that consequently cannot be interpreted in morphological terms. Our results corroborate an account of morphological effects based on abstract morphological representations organised paradigmatically, such as the one presented in the supra-lexical model (Giraudo & Grainger 2001), or the lexomes account recently presented by Baayen et al. (2015)
