Perceptual salience of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition

Abstract

This study analyzes the role of derivational suffixes in visual word recognition, tracking the eye movements of 31 participants in a sentence-reading task in Spanish. Perceptual salience of suffixes was operationalized as the proportion of letters represented by the suffixes with respect to the full words, that is, we relate the number of letters comprising the suffixes to the number of letters in the words in which they appear. The results reveal a significant role in first fixation duration of both word frequency –the more frequent the word, the shorter the fixations, and perceptual salience –the more salient the suffix, the longer the fixations. Moreover, in gaze duration, our results show a main effect of word length –the longer the word, the longer the fixations; word frequency; and significant interactions between word frequency and perceptual salience of suffixes on the one hand –the effect of word frequency is only significant when perceptual salience of suffixes is high, and between word frequency and word length on the other hand -the frequency effect decreases as word length increases. Overall results are interpreted in the light of the dual route models by which full-form and morphological processing interactively cooperate in visual word recognition.