title: Decomposition of prefixed words in Russian.
abstract: I examined the nature of morphological decomposition in a series of masked-priming experiments with Russian prefixed nouns. In Experiments 1A and 1B, I tested 3 types of prime-target pairs in which the prime was a morphologically simple word, and a facilitation was found when the prime and the target were truly morphologically related (e.g., narost [outgrowth] and rost [growth] are morphologically related via the prefix na- [on]) or apparently morphologically related (e.g., priton [den] and ton [tone] seem to be morphologically related via the prefix pri- [toward], but this relation is false) but not when the relation was purely orthographic (e.g., kumir [idol] and mir [peace]; ku- is not an existing prefix of Russian). These results suggest that all orthographic forms that can be exhaustively parsed into a prefix and a stem are decomposed into (apparent) constituent morphemes during their retrieval from the lexicon. This early segmentation process is driven by morpho-orthographic but not by morphosemantic considerations and applies even for derived forms that are more frequent than their stem.
authors.affiliation: School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, 12a Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TU, United Kingdom. nina.kazanina@bristol.ac.uk
authors.forename: Nina
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kazanina
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016014:Linear Models; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012426:Russia; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult