Inflectional Suffix Priming in Czech Verbs and Nouns

Inflectional Suffix Priming in Czech Verbs and Nouns Filip Smol´ık ([email protected]) Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Politickych´ vezˇ nˇu˚ 7, Praha 1, CZ-110 00, Czech Republic Abstract research suggested that only prefixes could be primed, but not suffixes (Giraudo & Graigner, 2003). Two experiments examined if processing of inflectional affixes Recently, Dunabeitia,˜ Perea, and Carreiras (2008) were is affected by morphological priming, and whether morphological decomposition applies to inflectional morphemes in vi- able to show affix priming in suffixed Spanish words. Their sual word recognition. Target words with potentially ambigu- participants processed the suffixed words faster if they were ous suffixes were preceded by primes that contained identical preceded by words with the same suffixes. The effect was also suffixes, homophonous suffixes with different function, or different suffixes. The results partially confirmed the observa- present when the primes contained isolated suffixes only, or tion that morphological decomposition initially ignores the af- suffixes attached to strings of non-letter characters. fix meaning. With verb targets and short stimulus-onset asyn- The literature thus indicates that affixes can be primed, chrony (SOA), homophonous suffixes had similar effects as identical suffixes. With noun targets, there was a tendency to even though there may be differences between prefixes and respond faster after homophonous targets. With longer SOA in suffixes in the susceptibility to priming. However, all re- verb targets, the primes with identical suffix resulted in shorter search sketched above worked with derivational affixes. It is responses than the primes with a homophonous suffix. Similar tendency was observed in some noun targets. The results con- not clear whether inflectional affixes are susceptible to mor- firm that it is possible to prime inflectional affixes, but that the phological priming as well. Given that some languages have mechanisms of morphological analysis may operate differently rich inflectional morphology and that many words in these for different types of affixes. languages appear with some inflection, the question about af- Keywords: morphological priming, affix priming, word recognition, morphological decomposition, inflection fix priming is highly relevant. Early vs. late decomposition Introduction The available evidence suggests that morphological decom- Numerous studies suggested that morphologically complex position of printed words proceeds by first removing all po- words are decomposed to individual morphemes during vi- tential affixes and subsequently checks if this decomposition sual word recognition. Most evidence for decomposition is the correct analysis. So, Rastle, Davis, and New (2004) comes from priming studies, in which morphologically re- showed that brother can prime broth, even though brother lated words are presented in succession. Repeating the same is not composed of the morphemes broth+er. Longtin, morpheme in both the first word (prime) and the subsequent Segui, and Halle (2003) speak about pseudo-derivation in word (target) results in faster processing of the targets, as this context and show that pseudo-derived words may prime measured for instance by the lexical decision task. words that seem related to them. The meaning-blind early The effects of morphological priming have been estab- morphological decomposition may be responsible for the lished first with words that overlapped in their root mor- difficulties in detecting suffix priming. Dunabeitia˜ et al. phemes. Words consisting of roots and affixes have been (2008) suggested that early decomposition is responsible for shown to prime their roots (friendly-friend), as well other the lack of affix priming effects reported by Giraudo and words derived from the same roots (confession-confessor, see Graigner (2003). Their study compared morphologically re- e. g. Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994). This lated primes (e. g. fumet-MURET) or orthographic control work established that word roots are accessed during the pro- primes (beret-MURET´ ). It is possible that the orthographic cessing of morphologically complex words. If this is the control primes were initially decomposed even though their case, functional morphemes should be accessed as well, and final segment (-et) is not a true suffix. Because of this de- it should be possible to prime the access to these morphemes. composition, Giraudo and Graigner (2003) did not detect any Priming of affixes proved more challenging than priming difference between these conditions. The evidence thus sug- of word roots. Some studies found priming effects between gests that early stages of morphological decomposition ignore words sharing prefixes, such as dislike-disprove. These ef- the meaning of affixes. If two homophonous affixes with dif- fects were stronger than if there was mere orthographic over- ferent function are presented, they should initially have the lap in the word initial segments, e. g. in uncle-unhappy same impact on the processing of subsequent words. (e. g. Chateau, Knudsen, & Jared, 2002; Giraudo & Graigner, 2003). While the findings with prefixes are quite robust, suf- Current study fix priming has been more difficult to establish. (Marslen- The present experiments explored whether the processing in- Wilson, Ford, Older, & Zhou, 1996) found evidence for prim- flectional affixes in Czech nouns could be affected by mor- ing between auditory primes and visual targets that shared phological priming. Of particular interest was the issue of derivational suffixes (darkness-toughness). However, some homophonous affixes and the process of their interpretation. 1667 Participants saw suffixed target words. These targets were Table 1: Sample stimuli from all conditions preceded with visual primes. In the two key conditions, the prime words ended in a suffix with the same phonetic form as Condition Prime Target the suffix in the target words. However, in one of these con- Noun targets baseline XXXX vaha´ ditions, this suffix was fully identical to the target suffix, i. e. identical LIPA´ vaha´ shared both its phonetic form and its function. In the other homophone SYNA vaha´ condition, the prime word contained a homophonous suffix allomorph VULE˚ vaha´ with a different function. Verb targets identical BERETE zijeteˇ The basic prediction was that the homophonous mor- homophone KURETEˇ zijeteˇ phemes should have similar effects as the identical morphemes in masked priming with short stimulus-onset asyn- chrony. In unmasked priming, i. e. with longer SOA, suf- the different-suffix condition. This was mainly because the fix with identical function should result in stronger priming number of possible stimuli was much smaller. Two versions effects than the homophonous suffix that merely shares the of the verb component were created and presented to approx- form but not the function of the target suffix. Experiment 1 imately equal number of participants, so that each target word tested the prediction for short SOA, Experiment 2 for longer was presented in each condition to equal number of partici- SOA. Each experiment involved two components, one with pants. All the experimental conditions were constructed so nouns and one with verbs as target words. The noun compo- that the prime and target words had approximately equal fre- nent of involved two additional conditions, the baseline, and a quency, and that in each version of the protocol, the mean condition involving a prime suffix with different form but the frequency of the primes and targets was approximately equal. same function as the target. The verb component only used The primes and targets always had the same number of letters. primes in the two conditions with homophonous affixes. Primes were presented in uppercase, targets in lowercase let- Experiment 1 ters. Besides the 140 experimental trials, 123 real word fillers All target words in each component ended with potentially and 270 nonword fillers were presented. The presentation ambiguous suffix. In the noun targets, this was one of the was block-randomized so that trials from different condi- Czech feminine nominative suffixes, -a. In the two key con- tions occurred with approximately equal probability during ditions, the primes also ended with -a. In the identical con- the whole experiment. dition, the primes were feminine nominatives, in the homophone conditions, they were masculine accusatives/genitives. Pariticipants Thirty-nine students participated in the ex- With regard to these two conditions, the prediction was that periment as a part of their course requirement. All were native there would not be no difference between lexical decision speakers of Czech. times on target nouns. With 50 ms latency, the primes should Procedure The experiment was presented on a laptop com- be decomposed and suffixes identified by the time of target puter using DMDX (Forster & Forster, 2003) as the presenta- presentation, but the function of the suffixes should not be ac- tion and response-collection software. Each trial started with cessed yet. In order to test whether decomposition occurred a fixation cross presented for 500 ms. Then, the prime word at all, a condition with orthographically distinct nominative was presented for 50 ms, followed by the subsequent presen- suffix primes was introduced in the noun component (no such tation of the target word. The target word was shown un- controls were possible for the verbs). Reaction times in this til response was made or until

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