Phonemic representations in morphological segmentation of written English words

We addressed the issue of the kinds of representations involved in morphological segmentation during visual word recognition. Specifically, we asked whether morphological segmentation operates on phonemic representations. The results of two masked priming experiments indicated that words with appearance of morphological complex structure (ponder) primed their apparent embedded roots (POND) as much as actual morphologically complex words (dreamer) primed their actual embedded roots (DREAM). However, the effect was significantly reduced in naming and it became inhibitory in lexical decision for primes (caper) whose phonemic representations did not completely overlap with those of their potential roots (CAP) but whose orthographic representations did. This suggests that morphological segmentation is not restricted to orthographic representations, but that it also engages phonemic representations.