Morpheme Position Coding in Reading Development

• Applicant: Dr. Jana Hasenäcker
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2017 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392311479

Readers of morphologically complex languages, such as German or Italian, are often confronted with the task of reading words that are composed of multiple morphemes (i.e., read+able, book+worm). Skilled readers automatically decompose such words into their constituent morphemes in order to grasp the whole word more quickly. This requires exact representations of morphemes. Information about possible positions of the morphemes within a word additionally facilitate word recognition: prefixes only occur wordinitial (re+read), suffixes only wordfinal (read+able), and stems both wordinitial and –final (book+worm). It is unknown, whether children already benefit from this kind of position-specific information. In German, children use suffixes earlier for word recognition in the course of reading development than prefixes. Position coding can be a potential reason for this developmental trajectory. Whether this trajectory pertains to other morphologically rich languages and what kind of representations and mechanisms are responsible for this will be investigated for reading acquisition in Italian. The proposed research project aims at shedding light on whether and how information about morpheme position is used by developing readers in efficient visual word recognition. The results promise new insights into the cognitive mechanisms involved in reading development in morphologically rich languages.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Italy
• Host: Professor Dr. Davide Crepaldi