Morphological Processing in Single-Word and Sentence Reading

Research on morphological processing has been mainly conducted in the single-word reading domain using the lexical-decision task. Similar research in the sentence reading domain has been conducted using eye-tracking techniques, yet the experimental paradigms used in each domain are not directly comparable. In the present study, we investigated morphological processing in single-word reading using the masked priming paradigm (Experiments 1a, 1b, 3), and in sentence reading using the fast priming paradigm in eye tracking (Experiment 2). The study was conducted in German using the same prefixed and suffixed items in both tasks. All experiments yielded an identical pattern of results, indicating early processing of the embedded stems, independently of whether these stems were combined with a prefix, a suffix, or a nonmorphological letter sequence. We interpret our findings in relation to previous results in the literature and discuss their implications for reading research both in the single-word and sentence-reading domains.