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How Orthography Modulates Morphological Priming: Subliminal Kanji Activation in Japanese

  • The current study investigates to what extent masked morphological priming is modulated by language-particular properties, specifically by its writing system. We present results from two masked priming experiments investigating the processing of complex Japanese words written in less common (moraic) scripts. In Experiment 1, participants performed lexical decisions on target verbs; these were preceded by primes which were either (i) a past-tense form of the same verb, (ii) a stem-related form with the epenthetic vowel-i, (iii) a semantically-related form, and (iv) a phonologically-related form. Significant priming effects were obtained for prime types (i), (ii), and (iii), but not for (iv). This pattern of results differs from previous findings on languages with alphabetic scripts, which found reliable masked priming effects for morphologically related prime/target pairs of type (i), but not for non-affixal and semantically-related primes of types (ii), and (iii). In Experiment 2, we measured priming effects for prime/target pairsThe current study investigates to what extent masked morphological priming is modulated by language-particular properties, specifically by its writing system. We present results from two masked priming experiments investigating the processing of complex Japanese words written in less common (moraic) scripts. In Experiment 1, participants performed lexical decisions on target verbs; these were preceded by primes which were either (i) a past-tense form of the same verb, (ii) a stem-related form with the epenthetic vowel-i, (iii) a semantically-related form, and (iv) a phonologically-related form. Significant priming effects were obtained for prime types (i), (ii), and (iii), but not for (iv). This pattern of results differs from previous findings on languages with alphabetic scripts, which found reliable masked priming effects for morphologically related prime/target pairs of type (i), but not for non-affixal and semantically-related primes of types (ii), and (iii). In Experiment 2, we measured priming effects for prime/target pairs which are neither morphologically, semantically, phonologically nor - as presented in their moraic scripts orthographically related, but which in their commonly written form share the same kanji, which are logograms adopted from Chinese. The results showed a significant priming effect, with faster lexical-decision times for kanji-related prime/target pairs relative to unrelated ones. We conclude that affix-stripping is insufficient to account for masked morphological priming effects across languages, but that language-particular properties (in the case of Japanese, the writing system) affect the processing of (morphologically) complex words.show moreshow less

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Author details:Yoko Nakano, Yu Ikemoto, Gunnar JacobORCiD, Harald ClahsenORCiDGND
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00316
ISSN:1664-1078
Pubmed ID:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27065895
Title of parent work (English):Frontiers in psychology
Publisher:Frontiers Research Foundation
Place of publishing:Lausanne
Publication type:Article
Language:English
Year of first publication:2016
Publication year:2016
Release date:2020/03/22
Tag:Japanese; decompositon; kana; kanji; morpho-orthography; morphologically complex words
Volume:7
Number of pages:10
Funding institution:Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship; Kwansei Gakuin University Research Grant (A); Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; University of Potsdam; [24520484]
Organizational units:Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik
Peer review:Referiert
Institution name at the time of the publication:Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
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