Morphological parafoveal preview benefit effects in reading: Evidence from Hebrew

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a three-consonantal root and a word-pattern (a nominal or a verbal pattern). Previous research has revealed that a parafoveal preview of a word derived from the same root morpheme as the foveal target word facilitated first-pass reading (as indexed by first fixation duration and gaze duration). In the current study we extended our research on parafoveal preview effects to other derivational morphemes in Hebrew and also examined whether context has an influence on these early morphological effects. We found that a parafoveal preview which had a common verbal pattern with a target word facilitated processing, but a preview with a common nominal pattern did not. These results are similar to previous results obtained using the masked priming paradigm with single words, and suggest that masked priming and parafoveal preview tap similar cognitive processes in word recognition. Furthermore, a preview of a verbal form (that was syntactically incongruent with the prior sentence context) inhibited the identification of a nominal form. However, biasing semantic context did not affect the first-pass reading time for target words which were previewed by a word derived from the same root. These results suggest that morphological information extracted from the parafovea in the initial phases of word recognition in Hebrew may be affected by syntactic contextual processes.