title: Transposed-Letter Priming Across Inflectional Morpheme Boundaries.
abstract: This study reports findings from two experiments testing whether a transposed-letter (TL) priming effect can be obtained when the transposition occurs across morphological boundaries. Previous studies have primarily tested derivationally complex words or compound words, but have not examined a more rule-based and productive morphological structure, i.e., inflectionally complex words, using masked priming. Experiment 1 tested TL priming with nonword primes and inflected targets (FOCUSING). Nonword primes were formed by transposing letters either within the root morpheme (fcousing) or across two morphemes (focuisng). Experiment 2 used the same nonword primes, but had the root words as targets (FOCUS). Both experiments showed similar TL priming effects for within-morpheme and across-boundary positions, indicating that morphological decomposition takes place only after letter positions in a word have been assigned. This finding provides additional evidence to previous research testing derived and compound words showing TL priming regardless of the position of transposition.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics and TESOL, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA. ehsan.shafieezargar@mavs.uta.edu.
authors.forename: Ehsan Shafiee
authors.initials: ES
authors.lastname: Zargar
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics and TESOL, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA.
authors.forename: Naoko
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Witzel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Inflected words; Morphological decomposition; Transposed-letter priming