Decomposing Words Into Their Constituent Morphemes: Evidence From English and Hebrew

Laurie Beth Feldman*, Ram Frost, Tamar Pnini

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

75 Scopus citations

Abstract

Participants segmented and shifted a sequence of letters from a source word to a target word and then named the product aloud. Morphemic and nonmorphemic letter sequences (e.g., EN) from phonemically matched words such as HARDEN and GARDEN were compared. In 4 experiments, naming latencies were faster for morphemic sequences than their nonmorphemic controls in both English, in which the morphemic status of the shifted sequence was varied and sequences were appended after the base morpheme (linearly concatenated), and in Hebrew, in which morphological transparency of the root (base morpheme) was varied and 1 morpheme was infixed inside the other (nonconcatenative) so that the phonological and orthographic integrity of the morphemic constituents was disrupted. Moreover, the likelihood with which both affixes and bases combine to form words influenced segment shifting times. In conclusion, skilled readers are sensitive to the morphological components of words whether or not they form contiguous orthographic or phonological units.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)947-960
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Volume21
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 1995

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