Does morphological structure modulate access to embedded word meaning in child readers?

Beginning readers have been shown to be sensitive to the meaning of embedded neighbors (e.g., CROW in CROWN). Moreover, developing readers are sensitive to the morphological structure of words (TEACH-ER). However, the interaction between orthographic and morphological processes in meaning activation...

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Published in:Memory & Cognition Vol. 49; no. 7; pp. 1334 - 1348
Main Authors: Hasenäcker, Jana, Solaja, Olga, Crepaldi, Davide
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Oct2021
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Oct2021
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        10.3758/s13421-021-01164-3
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        atl: Does morphological structure modulate access to embedded word meaning in child readers?
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        au:
          Hasenäcker, Jana
          Solaja, Olga
          Crepaldi, Davide
        affil: International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), via Bonomea 265, 34136, Trieste, Italy
      su:
        Italy
        Semantics
        Memory
        Reading disability
        Cognition
        Language acquisition
        Decision making
        Reading
        Language disorders
        Children
        Statistics
        Phonological awareness
        Confidence intervals
        Paired comparisons (Mathematics)
        Descriptive statistics
        Chi-squared test
        Research funding
        Data analysis software
        Data analysis
      sug:
        subj:
          Semantics
          Memory
          Reading disability
          Cognition
          Language acquisition
          Decision making
          Reading
          Language disorders
          Children
          Italy
          Statistics
          Phonological awareness
          Confidence intervals
          Paired comparisons (Mathematics)
          Descriptive statistics
          Chi-squared test
          Research funding
          Data analysis software
          Data analysis
      keyword:
        Embedded word identification
        Morphological processing
        Reading development
        Semantic categorization
        Visual word recognition
        Embedded word identification
        Morphological processing
        Reading development
        Semantic categorization
        Visual word recognition
      ab: Beginning readers have been shown to be sensitive to the meaning of embedded neighbors (e.g., CROW in CROWN). Moreover, developing readers are sensitive to the morphological structure of words (TEACH-ER). However, the interaction between orthographic and morphological processes in meaning activation during reading is not well established. What determines semantic access to orthographically embedded words? What is the role of suffixes in this process? And how does this change throughout development? To address these questions, we asked 80 Italian elementary school children (third, fourth, and fifth grade) to make category decisions on words (e.g., is CARROT a type of food?). Critically, some target words for no-answers (e.g., is CORNER a type of food?) contained category-congruent embedded stems (i.e., CORN). To gauge the role of morphology in this process, half of the embedded stems were accompanied by a pseudosuffix (CORN-ER) and half by a non-morphological ending (PEA-CE). Results revealed that words were harder to reject as members of a category when the embedded stem was category-congruent. This effect held both with and without a pseudosuffix, but was larger for pseudosuffixed words in the error rates. These results suggest that orthographic stems are activated and activation is fed forward to the semantic level regardless of morphological structure, followed by a decision-making process that might strategically use suffix-like endings.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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