{"pk":24802,"title":"Accessing the meanings of ambiguous word roots in context: Evidence from crossmodal priming","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How are morphemes recognized and interpreted during incremental sentence comprehension? We investigated this question in a crossmodal primed lexical decision task employing words that contain semantically ambiguous roots (e.g., ‘bark'; with meanings related to both “dog” and “tree”) but which are disambiguated when affixed by “-ing” (e.g., ‘barking'; related to “dog” only). We aimed to understand whether access to the meaning of the root ‘bark' would be constrained by lower-level morphological affixation. In our experiment, participants listened to sentences containing an affixed ambiguous root while concurrently performing lexical decisions to a visual target related to the root-only meaning, the affixed meaning, or matched controls. Targets were presented for 80 ms at the recognition point of bark or 500 ms post-recognition. We found that both meanings of the root were activated, despite affixation. Results suggest that a parsing system blind to semantics decomposes morphologically complex words into morphemes before recognition.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Language understanding; Morphology; Semantics"}],"section":"Abstracts","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/29r3s67v","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Cedric","middle_name":"","last_name":"Le Bouar","name_suffix":"","institution":"Concordia University","department":""},{"first_name":"Roberto","middle_name":"G.","last_name":"de Almeida","name_suffix":"","institution":"Concordia University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T12:00:00-06:00","render_galley":{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24802/galley/20898/download/"},"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24802/galley/14400/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24802/galley/18257/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24802/galley/20898/download/"}]}