Morphological priming

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As morphological priming is priming designated (changed processing processes of a stimulus caused by the prior activation of associated with this stimulus information) which consist in that the activation of morphological forms (the smallest linguistic units having an independent significance) processing morphologically these related forms. For example, the previous activation of the form says would influence the subsequent processing of say .

Research history

Morphological priming has been studied since the 1970s and represents an important method in psycholinguistic research into morphological processing processes. The first study that explicitly examines the subject of morphological priming comes from Murrel & Morton (1974). In contrast to previous priming studies, these used under experimental conditions, in addition to primes identical to the target (repetition priming), also primes that were morphologically related to the target without being identical to it (e.g. cars - car). The results of their study showed weakened priming effects for morphologically related items, but not identical to the target, compared to priming with identical primes and targets. Purely orthophonologically related items produced only weak, insignificant priming effects.

Stanners et al. (1979) were the first to investigate morphological priming in a lexical decision-making task . Their study found that inflected shapes prime their base just as well as the base shape itself, but derived shapes produce less priming effects. Stanners et al. (1979) consequently assume that regularly inflected verbs have no entry in the lexicon, whereas irregular past tenses and derivatives have an entry.

Subsequent studies came to the conclusion that morphological priming has an independent priming effect, in contrast to other properties that are common to prime and target. Hanson & Wilkenfeld (1985) contrasted morphological and orthophonological priming and found no priming effect for purely orthophonologically related items. Napps & Fowler (1987) also found no orthophonological priming effect. Bentin & Feldman (1990) investigated differences in priming between purely semantically related, purely morphologically related, and morphologically and semantically related items. There were clear differences over time for all three conditions. Stolz & Feldman (1995) were also able to differentiate semantic priming from morphological priming. Thus, there is evidence that morphological priming is not identical to semantic or formal (orthophonological) priming. However, various studies have found that the size of morphological primings is influenced by the size of the orthographic correspondence between prime and target (overlap) (Feldman 1995; Fowler et al., 1985).

Morphological priming has also been detected in languages ​​other than English, such as Italian (Laudanna & Burani, 1986), Hebrew (Bentin & Feldman, 1990), Serbo-Croatian (Feldman & Fowler, 1987), German and Spanish (Rodriguez-Fornells , Münte, & Clahsen, 2002; Weyerts, Münte, Smid, & Heinze, 1996), so it is not a process that is limited to English.

literature

  • Bentin, S., & Feldman, LB (1990). The contribution of morphological and semantic relatedness to repetition priming at short and long lags: Evidence from Hebrew. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42 (A), 693-711.
  • Feldman, LB, & Fowler, CA (1987). The inflected noun system in Serbo-Croatian: Lexical representation of morphological structure. Memory and Cognition, 15 (1), 1-12.
  • Fowler, CA, Napps, SE, & Feldman, L. (1985). Relations among regular and irregular morphologically related words in the lexicon as revealed by repetition priming. Memory & Cognition, 13, 241-255.
  • Hanson, VL, & Wilkenfeld, D. (1985). Morphophonology and lexical organization in deaf readers. Language and Speech, 28, 269-280.
  • Laudanna, L. & Burani, C. (1985). Address mechanisms to decomposed lexical entries. Linguistics, 23, 775-792.
  • Murrel, GA, & Morton, J. (1974). Word recognition and morphemic structure. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 102, 963-968.
  • Napps, SE, & Fowler, CA (1987). Formal relationship among words and the organization of the mental lexicon. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 16, 257-272.
  • Rodriguez-Fornells, A., Münte, TF, & Clahsen, H. (2002). Morphological priming in Spanish verb forms: An ERP repetition priming study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14, 443-454.
  • Rueckl, JG, Mikolinski, M., Raveh, Miner, S., M., & Mars. F. (1997). Morphological Priming, Fragment Completion, and Connectionist Networks. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 382-405.
  • Stanners, RF, Neiser, JJ, Hernon, WP, & Hall, R. (1979). Memory representation for morphologically related words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 399-412.
  • Stolz, JA, & Feldman, AB (1995). The role of orthographic and semantic transparency of the base morpheme in morphological processing. In LB Feldman (Ed.) Morphological aspects of language processing. (pp. 109-129). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Weyerts, H., Penke, M., Dohrn, U., Clahsen, H., & Münte, TF (1997). Brain potentials indicate differences between regular and irregular German noun plurals. NeuroReport, 8, 957-962.