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Highlights • Masked compound priming effects were tested in three groups of children and adults. • The results show robust compound priming effects, independently of semantics. • This pattern was unequivocally observed across all groups of participants. • Activation of embedded stems is a starting point in children's reading acquisition. Abstract The aim of the current research was to test the hypothesis that the activation of embedded words (e.g., the farm in farmhouse) is the starting point for the development of an abstract morphological parsing system in children's reading. To test this hypothesis, we examined the developmental trajectory of compound priming effects in third- and fifth-grade primary school children, high school students, and adults. Both children and adults participated in a masked priming lexical decision study comparing transparent compound (farmhouse–farm), opaque compound (butterfly–butter), and noncompound (sandwich–sand) word priming effects measured relative to an unrelated control. The results showed significant and equal priming effects in the two compound conditions but not in the noncompound priming condition. This robust pattern was clearly and unequivocally observed across all groups of participants. Our data suggest that even the youngest readers have already acquired the ability to rapidly and automatically identify embedded stems and are sensitive to the overall structure of compound words (full decomposition). We conclude that the activation of embedded stems provides a critical starting point in children's use of morphological information when learning to read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current evidence suggests that morphologically complex words (e.g., farmer) are automatically segmented into their constituent morphemes (farm + er) during reading, a process referred to as "morpho-orthographic segmentation." Intriguingly, the evidence also suggests that this segmentation process even operates on words with a pseudo-morphological structure (e.g., corner: corn + er). Here we describe an account of morpho-orthographic segmentation for derivational morphology in non-agglutinative Latinate languages that underlines the key role played by edge-aligned embedded word activation. According to this account, affixes play a secondary role in the segmentation process, helping segmentation during the early processing of complex words only when embedded word activation is hindered. This provides a mechanism for initiating morpho-orthographic segmentation without appealing to specialized morphological representations. Use of edge-aligned embedded word activation is also thought to be the starting point of morpho-orthographic processing during reading development, such that efficient processing of embedded stems developmentally precedes processing of affixes as orthographic entities. Furthermore, it is the hypothesized delayed learning of orthographic representations for bound morphemes (morphemes that are not free-standing words), such as affixes, that accounts for the developmental trajectory of morpho-orthographic priming effects and the overall influence of morphological structure on processing morphologically complex stimuli. Our account of morpho-orthographic segmentation explains both the standard pattern of masked priming effects found with truly complex (e.g., farmer) and pseudo-complex (e.g., corner) words, as well as the pattern of priming effects obtained with complex nonword primes (e.g., farmage, cornity). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior evidence from masked morphological priming has revealed conflicting findings regarding the acquisition of morpho-orthographic segmentation mechanisms in developing readers. Here, we examined changes in masked morphological priming across grade within a large sample of French primary school children ( n = 191, Grades 2–5) and how these effects are modulated by individual differences in reading proficiency, spelling proficiency, and morphological awareness. Target words were preceded by either (a) a suffixed word prime (e.g., tristesse–TRISTE ), (b) a suffixed nonword prime (e.g., tristerie–TRISTE ), (c) a non-suffixed nonword prime (e.g., tristald–TRISTE ), or (d) an unrelated prime (e.g., direction–TRISTE ) using very short prime durations (50 ms). Moreover, a frequency manipulation was included for suffixes and non-suffixes. The results revealed robust suffixed word priming across all children independent of grade and proficiency. On the other hand, priming in the suffixed and non-suffixed nonword conditions was modulated by reading proficiency, with high-proficiency children showing facilitation and low-proficiency children showing inhibition. The effects of suffix and non-suffix frequency were modulated by grade, with decreasing effects as grade increased. None of the observed priming effects were modulated by grade, spelling proficiency, or morphological awareness. The results suggest that reading proficiency is an important predictor for embedded stem activation mechanisms in primary school children, which we discuss in the context of recent theories of morphological processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We apply a new paradigm to study the role of morphology in reading development. • We show that the flankers task is sensitive to morphological relations, but only in adult participants. • Primary school children only showed effects of same-word (repetition) flankers. • The repetition flanker effects seen with children were restricted to short morphologically simple words. Recent research with adult participants using the flankers task has shown that the recognition of central target words is facilitated by the presence of morphologically related flanker words. Here we explored the development of such morphological flanker effects in two groups of primary school children (average ages = 8 years 6 months and 10 years 3 months) and a group of adult participants. We examined effects of a transparent morphological relation in two conditions: one where the target was the stem and flankers were derivations (e.g., farmer farm farmer) and the other where the flankers were stems and the target was the derived form (e.g., farm farmer farm). Morphological flanker effects were compared with repetition flanker effects with the same set of stimuli (e.g., farm farm farm ; farmer farmer farmer), and effects of related flankers were contrasted with the appropriate unrelated flankers. Results revealed no significant effect of morphological relatedness in the two groups of children and a significant effect in the adult group, but only for suffixed targets and stem flankers. Repetition effects for stem targets were found across all groups, whereas repetition effects for suffixed targets were found only in the older children and adults. These results show that morphological processing, in a context involving multiple words presented simultaneously, takes several years to develop and that morphological complexity (stem vs. derived) is a limiting factor for repetition effects in the flankers task with young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence from masked priming research shows that skilled readers can rapidly identify morphological structure in written language. However, comparatively little is known about how and when this skill is acquired in children. The current work investigated the developmental trajectory of morphological processing in a 2-year longitudinal study involving two large cohorts of German and French primary school children. The masked priming paradigm was used within an experimental design that allowed us to dissociate effects of (a) nonmorphological embedded word activation, (b) morpho-orthographic decomposition, and (c) morpho-semantics. Four priming conditions were used: affixed word (farmer–FARM), affixed nonword (farmity–FARM), nonaffixed nonword (farmald–FARM), and unrelated control (workald–FARM). The results revealed robust embedded word priming effects across both languages. However, morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic effects were evident only in the French sample. These findings are discussed in the context of a theoretical framework that specifies the distinct roles played by embedded words and affixes, their distinct developmental trajectories, and how the intrinsic linguistic properties of a given language may affect morphological processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Phonological and morphological effects were studied as a function of reading level. • Pseudo-homophone effects declined with reading expertise. • Pseudo-morpheme effects increased with reading expertise. • Results align with Grainger et al.'s (2012) model of learning to read. We examined the reliance on phonological decoding and morpho-orthographic decomposition strategies in developing and skilled readers of French. A lexical decision experiment was conducted where the critical stimuli were four types of nonwords, all derived from the same base word, such as the French word visage (face) in the following examples: (a) pseudo-homophone (PsH) nonwords (e.g., visaje), (b) orthographic controls for PsH nonwords (e.g., visape), (c) pseudo-morphemic (PsM) nonwords (e.g., visageable), and (d) orthographic controls for PsM nonwords (e.g., visagealle, where alle is not a suffix in French). Responses to PsH and PsM nonwords and their controls were studied in three groups of school children (Grades 1, 2, and 5) and one group of skilled adult readers. PsH interference effects (i.e., more errors to PsH nonwords than to the corresponding controls) decreased during reading acquisition to become nonsignificant in skilled readers. Interestingly, the opposite pattern was seen in PsM interference effects (also measured in terms of accuracy), which were already significant in Grade 1 and increased during reading development to reach their maximum in skilled readers. These results point toward opposing learning trajectories in the use of phonological and morphological information when learning to silently read for meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Children independently read sentences containing novel words four times. • A spacing effect was observed on orthographic choice (recognition memory). • There was no spacing effect on spelling to dictation (cued recall). • Findings link orthographic learning research to the temporal spacing literature. • Findings suggest this may be a promising avenue for future work. Despite substantial evidence that spacing study opportunities over time improves the retention of learned verbal material compared with study trials that occur consecutively, the influence of temporal spacing on children's learning of written words has not been investigated. This experiment examined whether temporal spacing influenced Grade 3 and 4 children's (N = 37; mean age = 8 years 7 months) learning of novel written words during independent reading compared with massing. Children read 16 sentences containing a novel word under either a spaced (sentences appeared once in each of four blocks) or massed conditions (four consecutive trials). After a delay, orthographic learning was assessed using recognition (orthographic choice) and recall (spelling to dictation) measures. Words experienced in the spaced condition were better recognized than those in the massed condition, but there was no effect on recall. These findings suggest that temporal spacing influences the acquisition of new written word forms, extending the potential utility of the spacing principle to reading acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skilled adult readers identify the first letter in a string of random consonants better than letters at any other position, and this advantage for the initial position is not seen with strings of symbols or familiar shapes. Here we examined the developmental trajectory of this first-letter advantage by testing children in Grades 1 to 5 of primary education in a target-in-string identification paradigm. Strings of five letters or five simple shapes were briefly presented, and children were asked to identify a target letter/shape at one of the five possible positions. Children responded by choosing between the target and an alternative that was a neighboring letter/shape (e.g., TPFMR—M vs. F at position 4). The serial position function linking accuracy to position-in-string was found to be affected by reading ability differently for letter stimuli compared with shape stimuli, and this was found to be almost entirely driven by differences in performance in identifying targets at the first position in strings. Here, accuracy increased more rapidly for letter stimuli than for shape stimuli as reading ability increased. This developmental pattern, plus the fact that letter strings were composed of random consonants and the task minimized the involvement of verbal recoding, allows us to exclude an explanation of the first-letter advantage in terms of serial reading strategies or phonological decoding. The findings suggest that the first-letter advantage is a function of, and a marker for, increasingly efficient orthographic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]