Taking the book from the bookshelf : Masked constituent priming effects from compound words and nonwords

Recent evidence from visual word recognition points to the important role of embedded words, suggesting that embedded words are activated independently of whether they are accompanied by an affix or a non-affix. The goal of the present research was to more closely examine the mechanisms involved in embedded word activation, particularly with respect to the “edge-alignedness” of the embedded word. We conducted two experiments that used masked priming in combination with lexical decision. In Experiment 1, monomorphemic target words were either preceded by a compound word prime (e.g., textbook-BOOK/textbook-TEXT), a compound-nonword prime (e.g., pilebook-BOOK/textpile-TEXT), a non-compound nonword prime (e.g., pimebook-BOOK/textpime-TEXT) or an unrelated prime (e.g., textjail-BOOK/jailbook-TEXT). The results revealed significant priming effects, not only in the compound word and compound-nonword conditions, but also in the non-compound nonword condition, suggesting that embedded words (e.g., book) were activated independently of whether they occurred in combination with a real morpheme (e.g., pilebook) or a non-morphemic constituent (e.g., pimebook). Priming in the compound word condition was greater than in the two nonword conditions, indicating that participants benefited from the whole-word representation of real compound words. Constituent priming occurred independently of whether the target word was the first or the second embedded constituent of the prime (e.g., textbook-BOOK vs. textbook-TEXT). In Experiment 2, significant priming effects were found for edge-aligned embedded constituents (e.g., pimebook-BOOK), but not for mid-embedded (e.g., pibookme-BOOK) or the outer-embedded constituents (e.g., bopimeok-BOOK), suggesting that edge-alignedness is a key factor determining the activation of embedded words.

© 2018 The Author(s).

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This research was supported by the Brain and Language Research Institute (BLRI, ANR-11-LABX-0036) and the Institute of Convergence ILCB (ANR-16-CONV-0002). It has benefited from support from the French government, managed by the French National Agency for Research (ANR-15-FRAL-0003-01) and the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University (A*MIDEX). We thank Nicholas Badcock, Saskia Kohnen, and Eva
Marinus for providing access to the extended version of the Castles and Coltheart Test 2, and Cornelia Van Scherpenberg for her help with data collection.

Supplementary material available at https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/JoC_Exp1data_csv/5797338