Morphological and semantic effects in visual word recognition: A time-course study

Some theories of visual word recognition postulate that there is a level of processing or representation at which morphemes are treated differently from whole words. Support for these theories has been derived from priming experiments in which the recognition of a target word is facilitated by the prior presentation of a morphologically related prime (departure-DEPART). In English, such facilitation could be due to morphological relatedness, or to some combination of the orthographic and semantic relatedness characteristic of derivationally related words. We report two sets of visual priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions (43 ms, 72 ms, and 230 ms). Results showed that morphological structure plays a significant role in the early visual recognition of English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic relatedness. Findings are discussed in terms of current approaches to morphological processing.