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Morphological processing in the flankers task

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journal contribution
posted on 2021-03-20, 18:00 authored by Jonathan Grainger, Joshua Snell, Elisabeth Beyersmann

Does the processing of words with a transparent morphological structure benefit from this structure? Here we show that the flankers task provides an interesting novel angle on this well-researched issue. Participants saw transparent suffixed target words flanked by their stem (e.g. farm farmer farm), as well as pseudo-suffixed words and non-suffixed words flanked by their embedded word (e.g. corn corner corn; cash cashew cash). Targets were also tested with unrelated word flankers (e.g. book farmer book), and participants made lexical decisions to the central targets. We predicted that truly suffixed word identification would be facilitated by the presence of stem flankers over and above any purely orthographic effects that were expected to be revealed in the pseudo-morphological and non-morphological conditions. We found exactly that pattern and conclude that parallel processing of distinct word identities in the flankers task is modulated by the transparent morphological relations between these words.

Funding

This research was supported by the French National Agency for Research [ILCB: ANR-16-CONV-0002; MORPHEME: ANR-15-FRAL-0003-01]. JG was supported by ERC [grant number 742141], EB by a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council [grant number DE190100850], and JS by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship [grant number MSCA-IF-2018 83322 3]. H2020 European Research Council

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