Ahn, H. W. , Nation, K. & Wonnacott, E.
Department of Experimental Psychology. University of Oxford. Oxford, UK.
Purpose: This study aimed to compare morphological decomposition in adults and children using masked priming. A well-established finding is the distinctly morpho-orthographic nature of morphological decomposition in the early stages of visual word recognition in adult readers. As the vast majority of findings are restricted to adults, this study aimed to investigate whether 1) there was evidence of morphological decomposition in children during early visual word recognition and 2) whether this decomposition was morpho-orthographic in nature. The focus of the study was restricted to the derivational -er suffix in order to ensure children were familiar with the suffix and its function. The derivational -er suffix was selected due to its high productivity (Bertram, Baayen, & Shreuder, 2000), frequency (Solomyak & Marantz, 2009), and finding that children as young as six are able to demonstrate epilinguistic and metalinguistic awareness of it in English (Duncan, Casalis, & Cole, 2009). Method: Forty 9-10 year old children and forty adults were run on a visual masked prime lexical decision task. All participants were native English monolinguals and typical readers. Test items were pre-piloted on children of a younger cohort and included in a post-test to ensure knowledge of each item. Results: Consistent with the adult literature, both adults and children demonstrated morphological decomposition of genuinely morphologically complex words, such as ‘builder’ into {build} and {-er}. Adults further showed morpho-orthographic decomposition in the parsing of pseudomorphologically complex words such as ‘corner’ into plausible morphemic constituents, {corn} and {-er}. In contrast, children failed to show morpho-orthographic decomposition. Conclusion: These findings suggest that 1) 9-10 year old typical readers have yet to acquire morpho-orthographic decomposition in early visual word recognition and 2) morphological decomposition is established prior to morpho-orthographic decomposition in the developing visual word recognition system.