Morphological anaylsis of disrupted morphemes: evidence from Hebrew.

Number 907
Year 1994
Drawer 17
Entry Date 07/16/1998
Authors Feldman, Laurie Beth, and Bentin, Shlomo.
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Publication The Quaterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47a (2), 407-435.
url http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0907.pdf
Abstract In concatenative languages such as English, the morphemes of a word are linked linearly so that words formed from the same base morpheme also resemble each other along orthographic dimensions. In Hebrew, by contrast, the morphemes of a word can be but are not generally concatenated. Instead, a pattern of vowels is infixed between the consonants of the root morpheme. Consequently, the shared portion of morphologically-related words in Hebrew is not always an orthographic unit. In a series of three experiments using the repetition priming task with visually presented Hebrew materials, primes that were formed from the same base morpheme and were morphologically-related to a target facilitated target recognition. Moreover, morphologically-related prime and target pairs that contained a disruption to the shared orthographic pattern showed the same pattern of facilitation as did nondisrupted pairs. That is, there was no effect over successive prime and target presentations, of disrupting the sequence of letters that constitutes the base morpheme or root. In addition, facilitation was similar across derivational, inflectional, and identical primes. The conclusion of the present study is that morphological effects in word recognition are distinct from the effects of shared structure.
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