Hierarchical structure in printed word recognition

Summary Naming-latency experiments are reported which compare theories of printed word recognition that assume direct vs. indirect mapping of a word's letter pattern onto a lexical representation. Inflected Dutch verbs were presented to subjects with all letters shown at once, and with some letters withheld for 30 or 60 ms. When letters were initially withheld, the part of a wordform first displayed included its stem, its root, its grammatical affix(es), and, if prefixed, its prefix and the part following the prefix. Nonmorphological control conditions were also defined. The priming effects found on naming latencies tend to support some morphologically mediated mapping of letter strings onto lexical items. Most facilitation was found when the stimulus information first presented included a word's root morpheme and was word initial. For lexically prefixed verbs a further division was supported between the morphs composing a word's stem.