title: Revisiting letter transpositions within and across morphemic boundaries.
abstract: Early morphological decomposition of complex words has been supported by evidence showing that the magnitude of masked transposed-letter (TL) priming effects is greater for within-morpheme transpositions than for between-morpheme transpositions. However, these findings have lately been called into question, and a recent article by Sánchez-Gutiérrez and Rastle (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20, 988-996, 2013) suggested that the above-mentioned interaction could have been the consequence of a false positive (i.e., a Type I error). Considering recent evidence showing that morpho-orthographic interactions are highly sensitive to individual differences in reading skills, we explored whether participants' averaged reading speeds were responsible for modulating the size of within- versus between-morpheme TL priming effects. A large-scale lexical decision experiment with a set of 420 suffixed Spanish words (N = 80 participants) was run using the masked-priming technique. The results revealed that individual differences modulated the magnitude of the masked TL priming effect between morphemes: Faster readers (but not slower readers) yielded greater TL priming for within- than for between-morpheme transpositions. The present data help reconcile previous divergent data by showing that faster readers revealed a morpho-orthographic interaction, whereas slower readers may rely more on a morphological-processing strategy that is not sensitive to morpho-orthographic interactions.
authors.affiliation: Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 2nd floor, 20009, Donostia, Spain, j.dunabeitia@bcbl.eu.
authors.forename: Jon Andoni
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Duñabeitia
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perea
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Carreiras
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult