Early morphological effects in word recognition in Hebrew: Evidence from parafoveal preview benefit

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal roo t and a word pattern. Two experiments examined the effect of the root morph eme on word identification by assessing parafoveal preview benefit effects. Although the information of the preview was not consciously perceived, pre view of the root's letters facilitated both naming and lexical decisions of target words derived from these roots. These results converge with previou s results in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, suggesting that morp hological units mediate early stages of word identification in Hebrew.