ABSTRACT

The goal of the paper was to investigate whether morphological units – stems and suffixes – influence orthographic processing by modulating visual attention demands to the task. Orthographic processing was measured with a visual one-back task requiring letters to be detected within pseudowords not including stems/suffixes, or containing real stems or real suffixes. Fourth grade children (between 9.5 and 10.5 years old) who read in a transparent orthography of a morphologically rich and agglutinative language (Basque) were tested. The results showed that the presence of morphemes in the strings did not improve letter detection performance though it slightly modulated the distribution of visual attention, showing a bias toward the processing of central letters in the presence of a stem. We suggest that the presence of highly regular and recurrent structures prioritizes stem identification, which when achieved, reduces visual attention deployment across the remaining letters.

摘要

本文的目的是研究形态单位（词干和后缀）是否通过调节对任务的视觉注意力需求来影响拼字处理。使用视觉单向任务测量拼字处理，该任务要求在不包含词干/后缀或包含真实词干或真实后缀的伪单词中检测字母。测试了四年级的孩子（9.5岁至10.5岁之间），他们以透明的拼字法阅读了形态丰富且具有凝集性的语言（巴斯克语）。结果表明，尽管词素中的词素稍有调节，但其在词根中的存在略微调节了视觉注意力的分布，但并没有改善其字母检测性能，这表明存在茎的情况下偏向于处理中心字母。