Stem homographs and lemma level representations.
Previous studies have found that priming a target like cerr-o ("hill") with an unmasked stem-homograph (e.g., cerr-ar, "to close") or with an unmasked allomorph of a stem-homograph (e.g., cierr-a, "he/she/it closes") has an inhibitory effect on target recognition. We report evidence from stem-homograph priming studies that implicate both morphological parsing and lexical selection processes at the lemma level. We argue that stem-homograph inhibition is the product of lexical selection mechanisms that are engaged just when a fully ambiguous stimulus (here, an inflectional stem) must be assigned one of its viable interpretations in order to afford conscious perception of lexical identity.
Allen
Mark
M
Johns Hopkins University. mkallen@u.washington.edu
Badecker
William
W
D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000379:methods; D011897:Random Allocation; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics