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Title: Do morphemes matter when reading compound words with transposed letters? Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials

Journal Article · · Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
 [1];  [2];  [3]
  1. Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States). Dept. of Psychology
  2. Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States). Dept. of Psychology and Beckman Inst. for Advanced Science and Technology
  3. Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States). Beckman Inst. for Advanced Science and Technology and Dept. of Educational Psychology

We investigate the online processing consequences of encountering compound words with transposed letters (TLs), in order to determine if cross-morpheme TLs are more disruptive to reading than those within a single morpheme, as would be predicted by accounts of obligatory morpho-orthopgrahic decomposition. Two measures of online processing, eye movements and event-related potentials (ERPs), were collected in separate experiments. Participants read sentences containing correctly spelled compound words (cupcake), or compounds with TLs occurring either across morphemes (cucpake) or within one morpheme (cupacke). Results showed that between- and within-morpheme transpositions produced equal processing costs in both measures, in the form of longer reading times (Experiment 1) and a late posterior positivity (Experiment 2) that did not differ between conditions. Our findings converge to suggest that within- and between-morpheme TLs are equally disruptive to recognition, providing evidence against obligatory morpho-orthographic processing and in favour of whole-word access of English compound words during sentence reading.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000; AG026308
OSTI ID:
1326900
Report Number(s):
SAND-2016-9308J; 647564; TRN: US1700155
Journal Information:
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, Journal Name: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience; ISSN 2327-3798
Publisher:
Taylor & FrancisCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 17 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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