Department of Cognitive Science and Macquarie Centre for Reading, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, 14195 Berlin, Germany; Department of Educational Psychology, University of Göttingen, 37073 Göttingen, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Aug;208:105140. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105140. Epub 2021 Apr 5.
Empirical evidence from masked priming research shows that skilled readers can rapidly identify morphological structure in written language. However, comparatively little is known about how and when this skill is acquired in children. The current work investigated the developmental trajectory of morphological processing in a 2-year longitudinal study involving two large cohorts of German and French primary school children. The masked priming paradigm was used within an experimental design that allowed us to dissociate effects of (a) nonmorphological embedded word activation, (b) morpho-orthographic decomposition, and (c) morpho-semantics. Four priming conditions were used: affixed word (farmer-FARM), affixed nonword (farmity-FARM), nonaffixed nonword (farmald-FARM), and unrelated control (workald-FARM). The results revealed robust embedded word priming effects across both languages. However, morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic effects were evident only in the French sample. These findings are discussed in the context of a theoretical framework that specifies the distinct roles played by embedded words and affixes, their distinct developmental trajectories, and how the intrinsic linguistic properties of a given language may affect morphological processing.
掩蔽启动研究的实证证据表明，熟练的读者可以快速识别书面语言中的形态结构。然而，对于儿童是如何以及何时获得这种技能的，我们知之甚少。本研究在一项涉及德国和法国两所小学的两年纵向研究中，调查了形态处理的发展轨迹。掩蔽启动范式被用于实验设计中，使我们能够区分（a）非形态嵌入式单词激活、（b）形态-正字法分解和（c）形态-语义的影响。使用了四种启动条件：附加词（farmer-FARM）、附加非词（farmity-FARM）、非附加非词（farmald-FARM）和无关控制词（workald-FARM）。结果表明，两种语言都存在强大的嵌入式单词启动效应。然而，形态-正字法和形态-语义效应仅在法语样本中明显。这些发现是在一个理论框架的背景下讨论的，该框架指定了嵌入式单词和词缀的不同作用、它们不同的发展轨迹，以及给定语言的内在语言属性如何影响形态处理。
