@article{jbp:/content/journals/10.1075/ml.18001.gea, author = "Geary, Jonathan A. and Ussishkin, Adam", title = "Root-letter priming in Maltese visual word recognition", journal= "The Mental Lexicon", year = "2018", volume = "13", number = "1", pages = "1-25", doi = "https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.18001.gea", url = "https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ml.18001.gea", publisher = "John Benjamins", issn = "1871-1340", type = "Journal Article", keywords = "lexical access", keywords = "root and pattern morphology", keywords = "Maltese", keywords = "Semitic", keywords = "visual masked priming", abstract = "We report on a visual masked priming experiment designed to explore the role of morphology in Maltese visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, subjects were faster to judge Maltese words of Semitic origin that were primed by triconsonantal letter-strings corresponding to their root-morphemes. In contrast, they were no faster to judge Maltese words of non-Semitic origin that were primed by an equivalent, but non-morphemic, set of three consonant letters, suggesting that morphological overlap, rather than simple form overlap, drives this facilitatory effect. Maltese is unique among the Semitic languages for its orthography: Maltese alone uses the Latin alphabet and requires that all vowels are written, making such triconsonantal strings illegal non-words to which Maltese readers are never exposed, as opposed to other Semitic languages such as Hebrew in which triconsonantal strings often correspond to real words. Under a decomposition-based account of morphological processing, we interpret these results as suggesting that across reading experience Maltese readers have abstracted out and stored root-morphemes for Semitic-origin words lexically, such that these morphemic representations can be activated by exposure to root-letters in isolation and thus prime morphological derivatives.", }