Witkowski, M. 1 , Szewczyk, J. 1 , Taft, M. 2 & Wodniecka, Z. 1
1 Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland
2 The University of New South Wales, Australia
The present study aimed at replicating facilitation effects typically observed in morphological priming experiment. In addition, we asked whether facilitation is still observed for semantically related primes that contain an altered stem (stem alternations frequently occur in noun inflection in Polish). 36 native speakers of Polish performed a lexical decision task, in which they were shown a set of 45 target words (plural or singular nominative nouns) and 45 orthographically legal non-words, preceded by masked primes. Each prime belonged to one of three conditions, depending on its relationship to the target word (e.g. “psa”): unrelated prime (e.g. “owcy”), morphological prime with unchanged stem (e.g. “psu”) and morphological prime with a changed stem (e.g. “pies”). Morphological primes were derived from target words by inflecting the target noun, changing its case and/or number, such that the stem was changed or unchanged, depending on the condition. All in flectional suffix changes, and stem alternations in non-words were fully matched on those in words. As expected, we observed a significant facilitation effect for all morphological primes, both for primes with an unchanged stem and to primes with a changed stem. For non-words, no priming effects were observed. These results replicate the well-known morphological priming effect in Polish. In addition they suggest, that the unaltered- and altered-stem inflectional variants of a word share the same lemma.