Haskins Publications

Number	965
Year	1995
Drawer	18
Entry Date	07/13/1998
Authors	Feldman, Laurie Beth, Frost, Ram, and Pnini, Tamar.
Contact
Publication	Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21 (4), 947-960.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0965.pdf
Abstract	Participants segmented and shifted a sequence of letters from a source word to a target word and then named the product aloud. Morphemic and nonmorphemic letter sequences (e.g. EN ) from phonemically matched words such as HARDEN and GARDEN were compared. In 4 experiments, naming latencies were faster for morphemic sequences than their nonmorphemic controls in both English, in which the morphemic status of the shifted sequence was varied and sequences were appended after the base morpheme (linearly concatenated), and in Hebrew, in which morphological transparency of the root (base morpheme) was varied and 1 morpheme was infixed inside the other (nonconcatenative) so that the phonological and orthographic integrity of the morphemic constituents was disrupted. Moreover, the likelihood with which both affixes and bases combine to form words influenced segment shifting times. In conclusion, skilled readers are sensitive to the morphological components of words whether or not they form contiguous orthographic or phonological units.
Notes