title: Exploiting degrees of inflectional ambiguity: stem form and the time course of morphological processing.
abstract: The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unambiguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming experiments in Finnish. Experiment 1 showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant facilitation for unambiguous words only with a long 300-ms SOA. Experiment 2 showed that all potential readings of ambiguous inflections were activated under a short SOA. Whereas the prime-target form overlap did not affect the results under a short SOA, it significantly modulated the results with a long SOA. Experiment 3 confirmed that the results from masked priming were modulated by the morphological structure of the words but not by the prime-target form overlap alone. The results support approaches in which early prelexical morphological processing is driven by morph-based segmentation and form is used to cue selection between 2 candidates only during later processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland. juhani.jarvikivi@mpi.nl
authors.forename: Juhani
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Järvikivi
authors.forename: Pirita
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Pyykkönen
authors.forename: Jussi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Niemi
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors; D014825:Vocabulary