Morphological sensitivity generalizes across modalities
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.
Article outline
- Materials and methods
- Participants
- Stimuli and experimental design
- Procedure
- Reading test
- Handedness
- Data preprocessing
- Data analysis
- Results
- Significant MIE in both auditory and visual modalities
- Sensitivity to morphological structure generalizes across modalities
- Lexical decision performance is inversely correlated with degree of word similarity
- RT is correlated with the number of letters and auditory stimulus duration
- Lexical decision performance is affected by learning and fatigue
- The MIE is correlated with single-word reading but not with text reading
- Discussion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
-
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