Inflectional Suffix Priming in Czech Verbs and Nouns

Inflectional Suffix Priming in Czech Verbs and Nouns Filip Smol´ik (smolik@praha.psu.cas.cz) Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Politick´ych vˇezˇn u ˚ 7, Praha 1, CZ-110 00, Czech Republic research suggested that only prefixes could be primed, but not suffixes (Giraudo & Graigner, 2003). Recently, Du˜nabeitia, Perea, and Carreiras (2008) were able to show affix priming in suffixed Spanish words. Their participants processed the suffixed words faster if they were preceded by words with the same suffixes. The effect was also present when the primes contained isolated suffixes only, or suffixes attached to strings of non-letter characters. The literature thus indicates that affixes can be primed, even though there may be differences between prefixes and suffixes in the susceptibility to priming. However, all re- search sketched above worked with derivational affixes. It is not clear whether inflectional affixes are susceptible to mor- phological priming as well. Given that some languages have rich inflectional morphology and that many words in these languages appear with some inflection, the question about af- fix priming is highly relevant. Abstract Two experiments examined if processing of inflectional affixes is affected by morphological priming, and whether morpho- logical decomposition applies to inflectional morphemes in vi- sual word recognition. Target words with potentially ambigu- ous suffixes were preceded by primes that contained identical suffixes, homophonous suffixes with different function, or dif- ferent suffixes. The results partially confirmed the observa- tion that morphological decomposition initially ignores the af- fix meaning. With verb targets and short stimulus-onset asyn- chrony (SOA), homophonous suffixes had similar effects as identical suffixes. With noun targets, there was a tendency to respond faster after homophonous targets. With longer SOA in verb targets, the primes with identical suffix resulted in shorter responses than the primes with a homophonous suffix. Similar tendency was observed in some noun targets. The results con- firm that it is possible to prime inflectional affixes, but that the mechanisms of morphological analysis may operate differently for different types of affixes. Keywords: morphological priming, affix priming, word recognition, morphological decomposition, inflection Early vs. late decomposition Introduction Numerous studies suggested that morphologically complex words are decomposed to individual morphemes during vi- sual word recognition. Most evidence for decomposition comes from priming studies, in which morphologically re- lated words are presented in succession. Repeating the same morpheme in both the first word (prime) and the subsequent word (target) results in faster processing of the targets, as measured for instance by the lexical decision task. The effects of morphological priming have been estab- lished first with words that overlapped in their root mor- phemes. Words consisting of roots and affixes have been shown to prime their roots (friendly-friend), as well other words derived from the same roots (confession-confessor, see e. g. Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994). This work established that word roots are accessed during the pro- cessing of morphologically complex words. If this is the case, functional morphemes should be accessed as well, and it should be possible to prime the access to these morphemes. Priming of affixes proved more challenging than priming of word roots. Some studies found priming effects between words sharing prefixes, such as dislike-disprove. These ef- fects were stronger than if there was mere orthographic over- lap in the word initial segments, e. g. in uncle-unhappy (e. g. Chateau, Knudsen, & Jared, 2002; Giraudo & Graigner, 2003). While the findings with prefixes are quite robust, suf- fix priming has been more difficult to establish. (Marslen- Wilson, Ford, Older, & Zhou, 1996) found evidence for prim- ing between auditory primes and visual targets that shared derivational suffixes (darkness-toughness). However, some The available evidence suggests that morphological decom- position of printed words proceeds by first removing all po- tential affixes and subsequently checks if this decomposition is the correct analysis. So, Rastle, Davis, and New (2004) showed that brother can prime broth, even though brother is not composed of the morphemes broth+er. Longtin, Segui, and Halle (2003) speak about pseudo-derivation in this context and show that pseudo-derived words may prime words that seem related to them. The meaning-blind early morphological decomposition may be responsible for the difficulties in detecting suffix priming. Du˜nabeitia et al. (2008) suggested that early decomposition is responsible for the lack of affix priming effects reported by Giraudo and Graigner (2003). Their study compared morphologically re- lated primes (e. g. fumet-MURET) or orthographic control primes (b´eret-MURET). It is possible that the orthographic control primes were initially decomposed even though their final segment (-et) is not a true suffix. Because of this de- composition, Giraudo and Graigner (2003) did not detect any difference between these conditions. The evidence thus sug- gests that early stages of morphological decomposition ignore the meaning of affixes. If two homophonous affixes with dif- ferent function are presented, they should initially have the same impact on the processing of subsequent words. Current study The present experiments explored whether the processing in- flectional affixes in Czech nouns could be affected by mor- phological priming. Of particular interest was the issue of homophonous affixes and the process of their interpretation.