[PS-1.6] Morphology and grammatical class: Noun and verb stems in Italian complex words

Crepaldi, D. 1 , Arduino, L. S. 2, 3 & Luzzatti, C. 4

1 MoMo Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
2 Department of Psychology, LUMSA University, Roma, Italy
3 Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR, Roma, Italy
4 Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

An issue that has gone largely unnoticed in the research on complex word reading is how grammatical class is processed within the word identification system. It is not clear from previous research, for example, whether morphological stems that sub-serve the formation of both nouns and verbs (e.g., deal-) have a unique, grammatical class-independent representation, or rather feature two separate, grammatical-class specific representations [1]. This issue was addressed in the present study through two priming experiments carried out in Italian. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to read aloud nouns and verbs that were anticipated by morphologically-related primes belonging to the opposite grammatical class (e.g., partenza-PARTIRE, departure-TO LEAVE). In order to disambiguate genuine morphological priming from semantic facilitation, the same target words were also paired in a second condition with semantically related, but morphologically unrelated primes (e.g., viaggio-PARTIRE, trip-TO LEAVE). Morphological and semantic primes were contrasted with separate sets of control primes, so that matching was guaranteed between related and control primes for written and spoken frequency, length in letters and number of syllables. The results showed reliable cross-class morphological priming; this effect was also shown to be independent from whether nouns primed verbs or vice versa, and from SOA (100 ms vs. 300 ms). In Experiment 2, cross-class morphological priming was shown to emerge even when the related primes were compared with control words that shared their orthographic and phonological onset (e.g., abbraccio-ABBRACCIARE, (the) hug-to hug vs. abbazia-ABBRACCIARE, abbey-to hug). This is taken to confirm that the effect is truly morphological in nature, and depends on the fact that morphologically related nouns and verbs contact the same, grammatical class-independent stem representation during reading. References [1] Caramazza, A., Laudanna, A., & Romani, C. (1988). Lexical access and inflectional morphology. Cognition, 28, 297‑332.