On the Interaction of Letter Transpositions and Morphemic Boundaries.

Investigations of the impact of morphemic boundaries on transposed-letter priming effects have yielded conflicting results. Five masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the interaction of letter transpositions and morphemic boundaries with English suffixed derivations. Experiments 1-3 found that responses to monomorphemic target words (e.g., SPEAK) were facilitated to the same extent by morphologically related primes containing letter transpositions that did (SPEAEKR) or did not (SPEKAER) cross a morphemic boundary. This pattern was also observed in Experiments 4 and 5, in which the targets (e.g. SPEAKER) were the base forms of the transposed-letter primes. Thus, in these experiments the influence of the morphological structure of a transposed-letter prime did not depend on whether the letter transposition crossed a morphological boundary.