Haskins Publications

Number	1259
Year	2002
Drawer	24
Entry Date	12/20/2002
Authors	Feldman, L.B., Bara-Cikoja, D. & Kostic, A.
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Publication	Memory & Cognition, 30, 629-636.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1259.pdf
Abstract	We examined the contribution of semantics to morphological facilitation in the visual lexical decision task at two stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) with Serbian materials. Primes appeared in Roman or Cyrillic characters. Targets always were printed in Roman. When primes were presented at an SOA of 250 msec, decision latencies to verbal targets showed greatest facilitation after inflectionally related primes, significantly less after semantically transparent derived primes, and less again after semantically opaque derived primes. Both were slower than after inflectionally related primes. Stated generally, effects of semantic transparency among derivationally related verb forms were evident at long SOAs, but not at short ones. Under alphabet-alternating conditions, magnitudes of facilitation were greater overall, but the pattern was similar. The outcome suggests that restricted processing time for the prime limits the contribution of semantics to morphological processing and calls into question accounts that posit a task-invariant semantic criterion for morphological decomposition within the lexicon.
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