MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF DISRUPTED MORPHEMES - EVIDENCE FROM HEBREW

In concatenative languages such as English, the morphemes of a word ar e linked linearly so that words formed from the same base morpheme als o resemble each other along orthographic dimensions. In Hebrew, by con trast, the morphemes of a word can be but are not generally concatenat ed. Instead, a pattern of vowels is infixed between the consonants of the root morpheme. Consequently, the shared portion of morphologically -related words in Hebrew is not always an orthographic unit. In a seri es of three experiments using the repetition priming task with visuall y presented Hebrew materials, primes that were formed from the same ba se morpheme and were morphologically-related to a target facilitated t arget recognition. Moreover, morphologically-related prime and target pairs that contained a disruption to the shared orthographic pattern s howed the same pattern of facilitation as did nondisrupted pairs. That is, there was no effect over successive prime and target presentation s, of disrupting the sequence of letters that constitutes the base mor pheme or root. In addition, facilitation was similar across derivation al, inflectional and identical primes. The conclusion of the present s tudy is that morphological effects in word recognition are distinct fr om the effects of shared structure.