TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ciaccio, Laura Anna
A1  - Kgolo, Naledi
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Morphological decomposition in Bantu
BT  - a masked priming study on Setswana prefixation
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - African languages have rarely been the subject of psycholinguistic experimentation. The current study employs a masked visual priming experiment to investigate morphological processing in a Bantu language, Setswana. Our study takes advantage of the rich system of prefixes in Bantu languages, which offers the opportunity of testing morphological priming effects from prefixed inflected words and directly comparing them to priming effects from prefixed derived words on the same targets. We found significant priming effects of similar magnitude for both prefixed inflected and derived word forms, which were clearly dissociable from prime-target relatedness in both meaning and (orthographic) form. These findings provide support for a (possibly universal) mechanism of morphological decomposition applied during early visual word recognition that segments both (prefixed) inflected and derived word forms into their morphological constituents.
KW  - prefixes
KW  - inflection
KW  - affix stripping
KW  - visual word recognition
KW  - African
KW  - languages
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2020.1722847
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 35
IS  - 10
SP  - 1257
EP  - 1271
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -