Kazanina, N.
School of Experimental Psychology. University of Bristol. Bristol, UK.
Research Question. We examined whether an independent morphological dimension for lexical representations is redundant and reducible to a combination of orthography and meaning overlap, as proposed by the Convergence theory (e.g., Seidenberg & Gonnerman, 2000). Our study. The French suffix -eur is a homonym that can express agentivity (-eur1 as in briseur ‘breaker’ from briser ‘to break’) or property (-eur2 as in largeur ‘width’ from large ‘wide’). In a masked priming task we investigated the effect of an -eur1 prime (e.g., amuseur1) on a target that ended in -eur1 (Same-suffix condition), -eur2 (Homonym-suffix condition) or a non-suffixal letter string ‘eur’ (Orthographic condition). Under a view that reduces morphology to the convergence between the orthographic and semantic codes, similar priming effects are expected in the Homonym-suffix and Orthographic conditions in which the prime and the target are semantically unrelated and share an identical amount of orthographic overlap (both factors were controlled). Method. A masked-priming task (500 ms mask, followed by 60 ms prime, followed by 500 ms target). 45 Canadian French speakers performed a lexical decision task to the target. Results. A significant facilitation (-19 ms) was found in the Same-suffix condition (i.e., the related prime amuseur1 significantly facilitated BRISEUR1 relative to souhait- BRISEUR1). No significant priming (5 ms, n.s.) was found in the Homonym-suffix condition, i.e., amuseur1 did not prime LARGEUR2. Finally, the suffixed prime amuseur1 inhibited targets like RUMEUR ending in a non-suffixal –eur (+18 ms). Discussion. Differential priming effects in the Homonym-suffix and Orthographic conditions suggest that orthographic and semantic considerations alone are insufficient to account for the interactions between lexical items, contrary to the central claim of the Convergence theory. We discuss relevance of our findings for theoretical models of homonym representation and access.