The time-course of inflexional morphological priming

Abstract

In Spanish. the contrast between the suffixes -a and -o in pairs of words such as loc-a/loc-o 'mad woman'/'madman' has a morphological value because it allows the gender selection of the stem loc. However, in pairs such as rat-a/rat-o 'rat'/'moment' this contrast has a lexical value, permitting the selection of two different words. The use of these two classes of word relationship, together with semantically related pairs such as sañaodio 'anger'-'hate', permits the study of the time course of morphological, orthographic, and semantic priming at 32, 64, and 250 ms. SOAs. Two experiments were carried out in which the priming effects for the previous categories were compared with unrelated priming and identity priming in a lexical-decision task. Morphological facilitation was obtained with 32 ms. and 64 ms. masked presentations of the prime word and with a 250 ms. unmasked prime. However, semantic facilitation occurred only with the unmasked prime and orthographic facilitation occurred only for the masked primes. Morphological, orthographic, and identity priming effects were of comparable magnitudes for the 32 ms. masked primes, whereas for the 64 ms. masked priming, orthographic priming was half the magnitude of morphological and identity priming. To what extent the facilitation for morphological pairs is due to a morphological stage of processing or, rather, to the summed effects of orthographic and semantic features is discussed. Agreements and differences with some recent studies in other languages are considered (Drews and Zwitserlood 1995; Frost et al. 1997; Rastle et al. 2000).