On the interaction of letter transpositions and morphemic boundaries

Investigations of the impact of morphemic boundaries on transposed-letter (TL) priming effects have yielded conflicting results. Five masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the interaction of letter transpositions and morphemic boundaries with English suffixed derivations. Experiments 1-3 found that responses to monomorphemic target words (e.g., SPEAK) were facilitated to the same extent by morphologically related primes containing letter transpositions that did (SPEAEKR) or did not (SPEKAER) cross a morphemic boundary. This pattern was also observed in Experiments 4 and 5, in which the targets (e.g., SPEAKER) were the base forms of the TL primes. Thus, in these experiments the influence of the morphological structure of a TL prime did not depend on whether the letter transposition crossed a morphological boundary.