Masked Morphological Priming Visual Lexical
Decision Task with Turkish Words
Samet Deniz
Middle East Technical University
ABSTRACT
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background: Humankind has a precious property that distinguishes them from the other creatures: language. It is a miraculous and at the same time mysterious system. Although it seems to be one of the basic and ordinary properties that people have in their lives, it is full of secrets that are waiting to be discovered. One of the secrets to be discovered is the processing of language which cannot be observed directly.
Data obtained from the languages across the world for over 35 years show that people have a visual word recognition system which helps them to analyze letter strings in terms of their constituent morphemes (Rastle, Davis & New, 2004). Morphologically complex words give us a lot of information about the visual word recognition system. It is found out that the visual word recognition
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The experiment was controlled by the software called E-Prime (Schneider, Eschman, Zuccolotto, 2002) which ran on a Windows 7 system. The masked visual priming method (Forster & Davis, 1984) was used with the help of the software. At the beginning of the each trial there was an asterisk in the middle of the screen staying there for 500 milliseconds. After the asterisk, there was a blank screen for 500 milliseconds followed by a forward mask of 9 hash signs (#) for 500 milliseconds. The forward mask served as a fixation point. After the hashes, the prime was shown for 41 milliseconds and then the target word was displayed for 750 milliseconds. When the time for the target word passed, the participants had 1200 milliseconds to decide whether the word shown was an existing word or not. The background color was black while the words were displayed in white color with the Cournier New font in size