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.

来自掩蔽启动研究的经验证据表明，熟练的读者可以快速识别书面语言中的形态结构。然而，对于儿童如何以及何时获得这种技能，我们知之甚少。目前的工作在一项为期 2 年的纵向研究中调查了形态加工的发展轨迹，该研究涉及两个大型德国和法国小学生队列。在一个实验设计中使用了掩码启动范式，它使我们能够分离 (a) 非形态嵌入词激活、(b) 形态正交分解和 (c) 形态语义的影响。四个吸条件：贴字（农民-FARM），贴非单词（farmity-FARM），nonaffixed非单词（farmald-FARM) 和无关控制 ( workald–FARM )。结果揭示了两种语言中强大的嵌入词启动效应。然而，形态正字法和形态语义效应仅在法国样本中明显。这些发现是在一个理论框架的背景下讨论的，该框架指定了嵌入词和词缀所扮演的不同角色、它们不同的发展轨迹，以及给定语言的内在语言特性如何影响形态处理。