Graded Semantic and Phonological Similarity Effects in Priming: Evidence for a Distributed Connectionist Approach to Morphology |
A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. We investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic, phonological, and orthographic codes. A series of cross-modal lexical decision experiments show that the magnitude of priming reflects the degree of overlap between words. Crucially, moderately similar items produce intermediate facilitation (e.g., lately-late). This pattern is observed for word pairs exhibiting different types of morphological relationship, including suffixed-stem (e.g., teacher-teach), suffixed-suffixed (e.g., saintly-sainthood) and prefixed-stem pairs (preheat-heat). The results can be understood in terms of connectionist models employing distributed representations rather than discrete morphemes. |