Why bridging is harder than running: processing zero-derivations in English visual word recognition
Linda Wheeldon
1
, Christos Pliatsikas
2
, Peter Hansen
1
Debra Malpass and Aditi
Lahiri
3
1 University of Birmingham
2 University of reading
3 University of Oxford
Address correspondence to: Dr. Linda Wheeldon, School of Psychology University of
Birmingham, Edgbaston, B15 2TT.
E-mail: l.r.wheeldon@bham.ac.uk

Priming covert morphological complexity
Reading morphologically complex words like disagreement has been shown to involve its decomposition into constituent meaningful parts (morphemes),
dis+agree+ment. However, morphological processes cannot be reduced to decomposition. Speakers also have implicit knowledge about how morphemes can be combined; e.g., the ending -ing can only be attached to verbs. Therefore,
bridge plus -ing is possible because the verb to bridge exists in the language, whereas dooring is not possible because the verb to door does not exist. In most languages nouns can be derived from verbs and vice versa, usually with the addition of an overt affix which tells you which is the base form (e.g., liquid (N)liquid-ize (V); write(V)-writ-er(N)). However, English also has zero-derivations between nouns and verbs which occur without the addition of an overt affix e.g.,
a bridge-to bridge; to run-a run. Bridge is object-derived and is a basic noun (N), whereas run is action-derived and is a basic verb (V). Therefore, to derive the base form from bridging, two steps may be required, namely,
bridging(V)>bridge(V)>bridge(N), while run(V) can be derived in one step from
running(V). Two priming experiments looked for evidence of such covert morphological complexity on visual word processing. In Experiment 1 the delayed-priming paradigm was employed, which is sensitive to morphological relatedness. One-step and two-step words (e.g., running and bridging) were primed by noun and verb phrases (e.g., a run/to run, a bridge/to bridge). Both phrase-types primed lexical decisions to two-step words to the same degree. A different pattern was observed for one-step words, which showed significantly more facilitation from verb phrases than from noun phrases. In contrast, no differences were observed using a masked-priming paradigm which is sensitive to surface morphological complexity during early visual processing. Our results demonstrate that morphological processing cannot be reduced to surface formbased segmentation.
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