Word recognition and morphemic structure (original) (raw)

1974, Journal of Experimental Psychology

Sixteen 5s learned a word list and were then tested on recognition of words presented tachistoscopically. When a test word was identical to one of the learned words, recognition was facilitated in the usual way. Pretraining with a word that was a different derivative of the same root morpheme as a test word gave significant facilitation of recognition of that test word. However, learning a word with comparable visual-acoustic similarity but no morphemic relation to a test word gave only slight, nonsignificant facilitation of recognition. It was concluded that the process of recognizing a word involves assigning it to a linguistic unit with specific semantic associations, i.e., a morpheme. Analysis of error responses suggested that, to some extent, root and suffix morphemes are recognized independently, and that suffixes themselves may be subject to frequency effects. The principles underlying the phenomena studied may be most appropriately characterized as "the morpheme-frequency effect." 1 This work was carried out at the Psychological Laboratory, University of Cambridge, while the first author was a final year undergraduate. The assistance of those who acted as Ss is gratefully acknowledged. 2 Requests for reprints should be sent to Graham