Early morpho-orthographic decomposition in Persian simple verbs

Abstract

A prevalent problem in psycholinguistic studies is lack of cross-linguistic evidence to evaluate models of language processing and production. Studies of morphological processing of written words suffer from the same issue. Most of these studies were conducted on Latin-based alphabets. The primary purpose of this thesis was to assess the findings in studies of morphological processing of written words in Persian, an under-studied language with a different writing system. This study also aimed to investigate the extent of early morpho-orthographic processing during which even pseudo-complex words like ‘corner’ are decomposed into ‘corn’ and ‘er’, in the same way that ‘farmer’ is decomposed into ‘farm’ and ‘er’. An additional aim of the study was to test the predictions of different theories of written word processing, in particular the sub-lexical and supra-lexical accounts as well as the Edge-aligned Embedded Word Activation Model and the Full Decomposition Model. The results of a masked priming lexical decision task point towards a form-based decomposition mechanism that manages to access the root in suffixed inflected verb forms with identical stems as well as inflected verb forms with an identical stem where the stem was embedded between a prefix and a suffix. However, inflected verb forms whose stems were not identical to that of the target did not yield any priming effects. These findings lend support to the sub-lexical theories of morphological processing.