Presented at the 19th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology; Paphos, Cyprus, September 17–20, 2015

Previous work in processing morphologically complex Greek words showed that processing of word targets in a lexical decision task is facilitated by prior presentation of morphologically related vs unrelated word primes, with both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). This can be interpreted as evidence for morphemically structured representations in the Greek lexicon, consistent with studies in other languages (e.g., Rastle, Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Tyler, 2000).

In the present study, we investigated whether priming facilitation between morphologically related word pairs could be attributed to shared orthographic form or shared meaning. Specifically, we examined whether priming is observed with primes that were either orthographically or semantically related to the target words. The same target words as in the previous experiments were used, again in a primed lexical decision task. Two experiments were conducted, one with short and one with long SOA. Data were collected by XX and XX native Greek participants, respectively. In the short-SOA experiment, results showed no facilitation by orthographically or semantically related primes. In contrast, in the long-SOA experiment, results showed facilitation for semantically related prime-target words and interference for orthographically related ones. Taken together, these results suggest that morphological priming effects observed in our previous work cannot be explained by orthographic or semantic effects early in visual word recognition. This means that morphological priming effects cannot be attributed to a simple co-occurrence of orthographic and semantic effects (cf. Feldman & Soltano, 1999; Rastle, Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Tyler, 2000).

References:
Feldman, L. B., & Soltano, E. G. (1999). Morphological priming: The role of prime duration, semantic transparency, and affix position. Brain and Language, 68(1), 33–39.
Rastle, K., Davis, M. H., Tyler, L., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2000). Morphological and semantic effects in visual word recognition: A time-course study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15(4/5), 507–537.