Early morphological effects in word recognition in Hebrew: Evidence from parafoveal preview benefit

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: A triconsonantal root and a word pattern. Two experiments examined the effect of the root morpheme on word identification by assessing parafoveal preview benefit effects. Although the information of the preview was not consciously perceived, preview of the root's letters facilitated both naming and lexical decisions of target words derived from these roots. These results converge with previous results in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, suggesting that morphological units mediate early stages of word identification in Hebrew.