The developing mental lexicon: Evidence from morphological priming of irregular Hebrew forms

This study investigated the development of automatic word recognition
processes, in particular the development of the morphological level of processing.
We examined masked priming of Hebrew irregular forms at two levels of reading
experience. Both third- and seventh-grade children showed morphological priming
for defective roots when primes and targets conformed to the canonical morphological
structure, containing all three letters of the roots, and also when the surface
form of the primes and targets contained only two of the root letters. However,
priming was not observed when primes and targets did not overlap in the surface
form of the roots, i.e. the full three-letter root as prime and only two root letters in
the target. These results suggest that both tri- and bi-consonantal representations of
defective roots exist in the mental lexicon of young readers. The formation of
interconnections between these allomorphic representations, however, requires
more extensive reading experience.