Do you see the -ing in SMOYING? Individual Differences in Nonword Processing

Although the use of morphological information in reading is well-documented, it is unclear whether all readers benefit from the identification of morphemic constituents. Moreover, previous results from inflection priming – in contrast to stem priming – are inconclusive. In this paper we investigate (1) whether inflection priming effects can be found when the stem is not an existing word, and (2) whether morphological effects are dependent on subjects’ reading skills and vocabulary size. We conducted a visual suffix-priming experiment in English with pseudo-inflected nonwords. We found that an inflectional suffix prime facilitated nonword judgment, and this priming effect interacted with the readers’ error rates. Further analysis showed that only subjects with a high error rate and only slow readers displayed morphological priming. We suggest that this reflects activation of morphemes as a sub-lexical strategy when direct mapping of form to meaning is unavailable due to lower orthographic skills.