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Transposed-Letter Priming Across Inflectional Morpheme Boundaries

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Abstract

This study reports findings from two experiments testing whether a transposed-letter (TL) priming effect can be obtained when the transposition occurs across morphological boundaries. Previous studies have primarily tested derivationally complex words or compound words, but have not examined a more rule-based and productive morphological structure, i.e., inflectionally complex words, using masked priming. Experiment 1 tested TL priming with nonword primes and inflected targets (FOCUSING). Nonword primes were formed by transposing letters either within the root morpheme (fcousing) or across two morphemes (focuisng). Experiment 2 used the same nonword primes, but had the root words as targets (FOCUS). Both experiments showed similar TL priming effects for within-morpheme and across-boundary positions, indicating that morphological decomposition takes place only after letter positions in a word have been assigned. This finding provides additional evidence to previous research testing derived and compound words showing TL priming regardless of the position of transposition.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and TESOL, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA

    Ehsan Shafiee Zargar & Naoko Witzel

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  1. Ehsan Shafiee Zargar
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  2. Naoko Witzel
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Correspondence to Ehsan Shafiee Zargar.

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Table 3 Items used in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2
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Zargar, E.S., Witzel, N. Transposed-Letter Priming Across Inflectional Morpheme Boundaries. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 125–140 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9423-5

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