Are words read visually (by means of a direct mapping from orthography to semantics) or phonologically (by mapping from orthography to phonology to semantics)? The authors addressed this long-standing debate by examining how a large-scale computational model based on connectionist principles would solve the problem and comparing the model's performance to people's. In contrast to previous models, the present model uses an architecture in which meanings are jointly determined by the 2 components, with the division of labor between them affected by the nature of the mappings between codes. The model is consistent with a variety of behavioral phenomena, including the results of studies of homophones and pseudohomophones thought to support other theories, and illustrates how efficient processing can be achieved using multiple simultaneous constraints.

Computing the Meanings of Words in Reading: Cooperative Division of Labor Between Visual and Phonological Processes.

http://psych.colorado.edu/~kimlab/pinkerullmantics2002.pdf

The past and future of the past tense

Much research suggests that words comprising more than one morpheme are represented in a “decomposed” manner in the visual word recognition system. In the research presented here, we investigate what information is used to segment a word into its morphemic constituents and, in particular, whether semantic information plays a role in that segmentation. Participants made visual lexical decisions to stem targets preceded by masked primes sharing (1) a semantically transparent morphological relationship with the target (e.g.,cleaner-CLEAN), (2) an apparent morphological relationship but no semantic relationship with the target (e.g.,corner-CORN), and (3) a nonmorphological form relationship with the target (e.g.,brothel-BROTH). Results showed significant and equivalent masked priming effects in cases in which primes and targets appeared to be morphologically related, and priming in these conditions could be distinguished from nonmorphological form priming. We argue that these findings suggest a level of representation at which apparently complex words are decomposed on the basis of their morpho-orthographic properties. Implications of these findings for computational models of reading are discussed.

/pdf/the-broth-in-my-brother-s-brothel-morpho-orthographic-1vu38316op.pdf

The broth in my brother's brothel: morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition.

Some theories of visual word recognition postulate that there is a level of processing or representation at which morphemes are treated differently fromwhole words. Support for these theories has been derived frompriming experiments in which the recognition of a target word is facilitated by the prior presentation of a morphologically related prime (departure-DEPART). In English, such facilitation could be due to morphological relatedness, or to some combination of the orthographic and semantic relatedness characteristic of derivationally related words. We report two sets of visual priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions (43 ms, 72 ms, and 230 ms). Results showed that morphological structure plays a significant role in the early visual recognitionof English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic relatedness. Findings are discussed in terms of current approaches to morphologic...

/pdf/morphological-and-semantic-effects-in-visual-word-24xqj6kb00.pdf

Morphological and semantic effects in visual word recognition: A time-course study

There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questio...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1529100618772271

Ending the reading wars: reading acquisition from novice to expert

On a distributed connectionist approach, morphology reflects a learned sensitivity to the systematic relationships among the surface forms of words and their meanings. Performance on lexical tasks should thus exhibit graded effects of both semantic and formal similarity. Although there is evidence for such effects, there are also demonstrations of morphological effects in the absence of semantic similarity (when formal similarity is controlled) in morphologically rich languages like Hebrew. Such findings are typically interpreted as being problematic for the connectionist account. To evaluate whether this interpretation is valid, we carried out simulations in which a set of morphologically related words varying in semantic transparency were embedded in either a morphologically rich or impoverished artificial language. We found that morphological priming increased with degree of semantic transparency in both languages. Critically, priming extended to semantically opaque items in the morphologically rich la...

/pdf/are-non-semantic-morphological-effects-incompatible-with-a-21ymemj8rf.pdf

Are non-semantic morphological effects incompatible with a distributed connectionist approach to lexical processing?

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf/S1364-6613(00)01515-1.pdf

Explaining derivational morphology as the convergence of codes.

Data from masked priming experiments have been used to support a traditional view of the mental lexicon where morphemes are stored discretely and complex words are decomposed in processing. In masked priming, visual primes are presented briefly and masked so to that subjects cannot consciously process them. This paradigm is generally considered insensitive to semantic effects. Thus, results showing greater facilitation for morphologically complex (cars-car) compared to orthographically overlapping prime-target pairs (card-car) are argued to arise from morphological rather than semantic factors. In contrast, in two experiments using a masked priming paradigm, we demonstrate that semantic similarity modulates priming: highly related items (hardly-hard: 30 ms) primed more than moderately related items (lately-late: 19 ms), while unrelated items did not prime (boldly-bold: -1 ms). Furthermore, very highly semantically related items with no form overlap (profit-gain) produced significant facilitation (21 ms). This surprising pattern of results suggests that semantic information is available very early on, even in the absence of conscious processing. Moreover, the graded priming effects support a view of morphology as an interlevel representation that mediates mappings between semantics and phonology and that emerges in the service of language acquisition and processing. On this view, morphology reflects structure present in the world: language input contains patterns that are picked up on by language learners to the extent that they are useful in solving the primary tasks of competent speakers, that is comprehending and producing speech.

Laura M. Gonnerman

Papers

Are non-semantic morphological effects incompatible with a distributed connectionist approach to lexical processing?

Explaining derivational morphology as the convergence of codes.

Semantic and morphological effects in masked priming

11. Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in morphologically complex words