Does the reading brain possess top-down connections from morphemes to letters?
- 1Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 2Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France
- 3Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Abstract
No psycholinguist will contradict the importance of morphemes in language processing. But as a cognitive construct, the morpheme and its operations are not fully mapped out yet. Here, we investigated whether morphemes provide top-down support for their constituent letters: a so-called morpheme superiority effect. In two experiments (N = 100 per experiment), French participants identified single letters in nonword strings that either comprised a French affix (e.g., ‘o’ in ‘cojuste’) or not (‘o’ in ‘sojuste’). In Experiment 1 participants provided free-recall responses by typing letters seen at postcued locations. Experiment 2 was a Reicher–Wheeler (i.e., two-alternative forced-choice) version of the same task. Neither experiment evidenced better identification of target letters embedded in affixes than nonaffixes. On the other hand, we did observe an impact of the frequencies of embedding N-grams (i.e., letter chunks). Hence, while the brain learns and represents letter combinations, we did not observe evidence for morpheme representations partaking in the brain’s feedback loop. Findings are discussed in light of the recent PONG model of word recognition.
Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-026-03037-9.
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BibTeX
@article{mlinaric2026does,
title = {{Does the reading brain possess top-down connections from morphemes to letters?}},
author = {Maša Mlinarič and Jonathan Grainger and Elisabeth Beyersmann and Joshua Snell},
journal = {Psychonomic Bulletin \& Review},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.3758/s13423-026-03037-9},
url = {https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-026-03037-9},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Does the reading brain possess top-down connections from morphemes to letters?
AU - Maša Mlinarič
AU - Jonathan Grainger
AU - Elisabeth Beyersmann
AU - Joshua Snell
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
JO - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
DO - 10.3758/s13423-026-03037-9
UR - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-026-03037-9
AB - No psycholinguist will contradict the importance of morphemes in language processing. But as a cognitive construct, the morpheme and its operations are not fully mapped out yet. Here, we investigated whether morphemes provide top-down support for their constituent letters: a so-called morpheme superiority effect. In two experiments (N = 100 per experiment), French participants identified single letters in nonword strings that either comprised a French affix (e.g., ‘o’ in ‘cojuste’) or not (‘o’ in ‘sojuste’). In Experiment 1 participants provided free-recall responses by typing letters seen at postcued locations. Experiment 2 was a Reicher–Wheeler (i.e., two-alternative forced-choice) version of the same task. Neither experiment evidenced better identification of target letters embedded in affixes than nonaffixes. On the other hand, we did observe an impact of the frequencies of embedding N-grams (i.e., letter chunks). Hence, while the brain learns and represents letter combinations, we did not observe evidence for morpheme representations partaking in the brain’s feedback loop. Findings are discussed in light of the recent PONG model of word recognition. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-026-03037-9.
SN - 1069-9384
SN - 1531-5320
ER -