Meaning is in the beholders's eye: Morpho-semantic effects in masked priming

A substantial body of literature indicates that, at least at some level of processing, complex words are broken down into their morphemes solely on the basis of their orthographic form (e.g., Rastle, Davis and New, 2004). Recent evidence has shown that this process might not be obligatory, as indicated by the fact that morpho-orthographic effects were not found in a cross-case same-different task, i.e., when lexical access is not necessarily required (Dunabeitia, Kinoshita, Carreiras and Norris, 2011). In this study we employed a task that requires to understand a series of words, and thus implies lexical access. Masked primes were shown very briefly right before the appearance of the target word; prime-target pairs entertained either a morpho-semantic (dealer-DEAL), a morpho-orthographic (corner-CORN), or a purely orthographic relationship (brothel-BROTH). Eye fixation times clearly indicate facilitation for transparent pairs, but not for opaque pairs (nor for orthographic pairs, which were used as a baseline). These results indicate that the access to a morpho-orthographic level of representation is not always necessary for lexical identification, which challenges models of visual word identification that cannot account for task-induced effects