Morphological priming: Dissociation of phonological, semantic, and morphological factors

Previous experiments based on a masked-priming paradigm revealed robust mor phological priming effects induced by two derivational morphemes in Hebrew: the root and the verbal pattern. However, considering the special characte ristics of the masked-priming paradigm, the possible contributions of phono logical and/or semantic factors to these morphological effects could not be firmly assessed. In the present study, the role of these factors in morpho logical priming was examined, using cross-modal presentation. Experiment 1 revealed that priming between morphologically related words in Hebrew is de termined by higher level linguistic characteristics and cannot be reduced t o phonological overlap. Experiment 2 confirmed that morphological priming o ccurs in Hebrew even when primes and targets are not semantically related b ut, nevertheless, increases with semantic similarity. The results support t he claim that morphological priming cannot be accounted for by considering semantic and phonological factors alone, and they exemplify the potential o f using both masked and cross-modal priming to examine morphological proces sing.