Université de Poitiers, Université de Tours and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Poitiers, France.
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montral, Canada.
Dev Sci. 2018 Jul;21(4):e12607. doi: 10.1111/desc.12607. Epub 2017 Oct 12.
The way children organize words in their memory has intrigued many researchers in the past 20 years. Given the large number of morphologically complex words in many languages, the influence of morphemes on this organization is being increasingly examined. The aim of this study was to understand how morphemic information influences English-speaking children's word recognition. Children in grades 3 and 5 were asked to complete a lexical decision priming task. Prime-target pairs varied in semantic similarity, with low (e.g., belly-bell), moderate (e.g., lately-late), and high similarity relations (e.g., boldly-bold). There were also word pairs similar in form only (e.g., spinach-spin) and in semantics only (e.g., garbage-trash). Primes were auditory and targets were presented visually. Analyses of children's lexical decision times revealed graded priming effects as a function of the convergence of form and meaning. These results indicate that developing readers do not necessarily need to lexicalize morphological units to facilitate word recognition. Their ability to process the morphological structure of words depends on their ability to develop connections between form and meaning.
在过去的 20 年里，许多研究人员对儿童在记忆中组织单词的方式产生了兴趣。鉴于许多语言中存在大量形态复杂的单词，词素对这种组织的影响正越来越受到关注。本研究旨在了解词素信息如何影响英语儿童的单词识别。要求 3 年级和 5 年级的儿童完成词汇决策启动任务。启动-目标对在语义相似性上存在差异，具有低（例如，belly-bell）、中（例如，lately-late）和高相似性关系（例如，boldly-bold）。还有仅在形式上相似的词对（例如，spinach-spin）和仅在语义上相似的词对（例如，garbage-trash）。启动词是听觉的，目标词是视觉呈现的。对儿童词汇决策时间的分析显示，作为形式和意义趋同的函数，存在分级启动效应。这些结果表明，发展中的读者不一定需要将形态单位词汇化来促进单词识别。他们处理单词形态结构的能力取决于他们在形式和意义之间建立联系的能力。
