Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms.

The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular (billed-bill) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length (fell-fall; taught-teach).

Multiple dimensions of relatedness among words: Conjoint effects of form and meaning in word recognition.

Words can be similar with respect to form (viz., spelling, pronunciation), meaning, or both form and meaning. In three lexical decision experiments (48 ms forward masked, 116 ms, and 250 ms SOAs), targets (e.

Does prime modality influence morphological processing?

Facilitation among morphologically related words generally is impervious to the prefixed or suffixed structure of primes and targets. A notable exception arises, however, when both primes and targets are suffixed. More specifically, when primes are auditory and targets are visual, facilitation for a suffixed target (e.

Discrepancies between orthographic and unrelated baselines in masked priming undermine a decompositional account of morphological facilitation.

This study uses the masked priming procedure to compare the decompositionality of regular with irregular English past tense forms relative to both an unrelated baseline and a baseline matched on orthographic similarity to the morphological prime. Morphological facilitation varies with the degree of similarity between related primes and targets. Discrepancies between unrelated and orthographic baselines arise when prime and target match in length and form overlap is high.