Cross-linguistic differences in morphological processing: evidence from English and Italian

Elisabetta De Simone*, Kristina Moll, Elisabeth Beyersmann

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Purpose: The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in orthographic transparency and morphological complexity during complex word recognition in English and Italian. If morphological processing is more important in orthographically transparent and morphemically rich languages, larger morpheme-effects should be evident in Italian. However, if morphological processing is more pronounced in orthographically opaque and morphemically sparser languages, morpheme-effects should be larger in English. Method: 60 Italian (Mage = 25.33, 34 females, Caucasian) and 60 English (Mage = 26.35, 34 females, mostly Caucasian) native-speakers completed an online lexical decision task, while reaction times and accuracy were measured. To tease apart the independent role of stems and suffixes, we employed four types of nonwords: Stem+Suffix: night+ness, Stem+NonSuffix: night-lude, NonStem+Suffix: nisht+ness, NonStem+NonSuffix: nisht-lude). Results: The results revealed a significant morpheme interference effect in both languages: nonwords with stems were read slower and less accurately than those without stems and nonwords with suffixes slower and less accurately than those without suffixes. Crucially, this observed pattern was larger in English than Italian. Also, a significant Stem by Suffix interaction suggested that Stem+Suffix nonwords were harder to reject than all others. Conclusion: The current findings suggest that morphological processing is more pronounced in opaque orthographies like English, possibly because the activation of morphemic chunks can be used to compensate for grapheme-to-phoneme inconsistencies.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages20
JournalScientific Studies of Reading
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 10 Oct 2024

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