Graded aspects of morphological processing: task and processing time

Effects on targets of orthographically (O) and semantically (S) related primes were compared with morphologically related (M) primes in the lexical decision, naming, and go/no go naming tasks. The overall pattern typified the graded nature of morphological processing. Morphological relatedness produced facilitation whose magnitude varied across a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs of 66-300 ms) and tasks. The effect of semantic and orthographic similarity also depended on SOA and on task. Importantly, the effects of morphological relatedness and orthographic similarity diverged along a time course that reflected semantic processing but could only be approximated by the effect of semantic relatedness between prime and target.