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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.

Masked priming studies have shown that readers decompose morphologically complex words (read+er). Interindividual differences have been suggested to affect this phenomenon. However, its development...

Reading development involves several changes in orthographic processing. A key question is, "how does the coding of letters develops in children learning to read?" Masked priming effects of transposition and substitution primes have been taken to index the importance of letter position and identity coding. Somewhat contradicting results for developing readers have led to opposing theories. Here, we present new evidence from a large longitudinal study with over 100 children from grade 2 to 4. We investigate three different issues concerning transposition and substitution priming: (a) comparing priming both against an all-different and an identity baseline, (b) testing priming effects for nonword targets, and (c) taking into account interindividual differences in orthographic knowledge. The analyses of the longitudinal data show, respectively, (a) an increase of priming effects over development in comparison to both baselines, (b) identity priming for nonword targets in the elementary school years, and (c) an additional impact of orthographic knowledge on priming effects for word, but not nonword, targets that is similar to the effect of grade. Taken together, our examination suggests that letter identity is coded relatively strictly, whereas letter position is coded relatively flexibly already early in reading development for words, but not for nonwords. We discuss how this pattern fits with different developmental models of orthographic processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Current models of morphological processing differ in their assumptions about the recognition of compound words. The relative contribution of the first and second constituent and the whole-word remains unsolved. Particularly for beginning readers, the first constituent might have a privileged role attributable to more sequential decoding strategies. In a series of lexical decision experiments, the influence of constituent and whole-word frequencies on compound recognition was examined in German developing readers as well as adults. Results showed that whole-word and first constituent frequency interactively influenced response times in children. For adults, an effect of whole-word frequency only was obtained for the children's stimuli set, and noninteracting effects of whole-word frequency and first constituent frequency were found when using adult frequency measures. Together, the results suggest that developing readers already decompose compounds and that hybrid interactive models of morphological processing are most suitable to explain compound recognition across development. The applicability of amorphous models is also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Suffixes have been shown to be recognized as units of processing in visual word recognition and their identification has been argued to be position-specific in skilled adult readers: in lexical decision tasks suffixes are automatically identified at word endings, but not at word beginnings. The present study set out to investigate whether position-specific coding can be detected with a letter search task and whether children already code suffixes as position-specific units. A preregistered experiment was conducted in Italian in which 3rd-graders, 5th-graders, and adults had to detect a target letter that was either contained in the suffix of a pseudoword (e.g., S in flagish vs. flagosh) or in a non-suffix control (e.g., S in flagish vs. flagosh). To investigate sensitivity to position, letters also had to be detected in suffixes and non-suffixes placed in reversed position, that is in the beginning of pseudowords (e.g., S in ishflag vs. oshflag). Results suggested position-specific processing differences between suffixes and non-suffixes that develop throughout reading development. However, some effects were weak and only partially compatible with the hypotheses. Therefore, a second experiment was conducted. The effects of position-specific suffix identification could not be replicated. A combined analysis additionally using a Bayesian approach indicated no processing differences between suffixes and non-suffixes in our task. We discuss potential interpretations and the possibility of letter search being unsuited to investigate small processing differences. We connect our example of failed self-replication to the current discussion about the replication crisis in psychology and the lesson psycholinguistics can learn.

German verb stems may be combined with a particle or a prefix, forming particle and prefixed verbs, respectively. Both types of verbs are morphologically complex, yet particles are free morphemes, which are routinely separated from their stem and can stand alone in a sentence, whereas prefixes are bound morphemes, which are attached to their stem and cannot stand alone in a sentence. Morphologically complex words are thought to be segmented into their constituent morphemes during reading. On this assumption, we took advantage of the separability feature of the constituent morphemes of particle verbs to investigate how the segmentation process occurs in skilled reading. Thirty German adults participated in a sentence-reading task that employed the eye-contingent boundary paradigm in eye-tracking. We observed no differences in the processing of particle and prefixed verbs, which suggests that idiosyncratic linguistic characteristics do not modulate the way morphologically complex words are segmented in skilled reading.

The developmental trajectory of the use of morphemes is still unclear. We investigated the emergence of morphological effects on visual word recognition in German in a large sample across the complete course of reading acquisition in elementary school. To this end, we analyzed lexical decision data on a total of 1,152 words and pseudowords from a large cross-sectional sample of German children from the beginning of Grade 2 through 6, and a group of adults. We expand earlier evidence by (a) explicitly investigating processing differences between compounds, prefixes and suffixes, (b) taking into account vocabulary knowledge as an indicator for interindividual differences. Results imply that readers of German are sensitive to morphology in very early stages of reading acquisition with trajectories depending on morphological type and vocabulary knowledge. Facilitation from compound structure comes early in development, followed by facilitation from suffixes and prefixes later on in development. This indicates that stems and different types of affixes involve distinct processing mechanisms in beginning readers. Furthermore, children with higher vocabulary knowledge benefit earlier in development and to a greater extent from morphology. Our results specify the development and functional role of morphemes as reading units. (PsycINFO Database Record

Although it is well established that beginning readers rely heavily on phonological decoding, the overlap of the phonological pathways used in visual and auditory word recognition is not clear. Especially in transparent languages, phonological reading could use the same pathways as spoken word processing. In the present study, we report a direct comparison of lexical decision performance in the visual and auditory modality in beginning readers of a transparent language. Using lexical decision, we examine how marker effects of length and frequency differ in the two modalities and how these differences are modulated by reading ability. The results show that both frequency and length effects are stronger in the visual modality, and the differences in length effects between modalities are more pronounced for poorer readers than for better readers. This suggests that visual word recognition in beginning readers of a transparent language initially is based on phonological decoding and subsequent matching in the phonological lexicon, especially for poor readers. However, some orthographic processing seems to be involved already. We claim that the relative contribution of the phonological and orthographic route in beginning readers can be measured by the differences in marker effects between auditory and visual lexical decision.

Children have been found to use units such as syllables and morphemes in fine-grained reading processes, before they transition to a coarse-grained, holistic route. Which units they prefer at different stages in reading development is unresolved. The present study compares the use of syllables and morphemes. Second graders, fourth graders, and adults performed a lexical decision task on multimorphemic and monomorphemic words and pseudowords that were visually disrupted either syllable-congruent or syllable-incongruent (i.e., morpheme-congruent in multimorphemic items). Syllables turned out to be the preferred unit of fine-grained processing for second graders, while fourth graders also used morphemes when morphemes were emphasized by the presentation format. Moreover, the study supports the assumption that children rely more on fine-grained processing, while adults have more coarse-grained processing.