Orthographic and semantic opacity in masked and delayed priming: Evidence from Greek

Research using the masked priming paradigm has suggested that there is a form of morphological decomposition that is robust to orthographic alterations, even when the words are not semantically related (e.g., badger/badge). In contrast, delayed priming is influenced by semantic relatedness but it is not clear whether it can survive orthographic changes. In this paper, we ask whether morpho-orthographic segmentation breaks down in the presence of the extensive orthographic changes found in Greek morphology (orthographic opacity). The effects of semantic relatedness and orthographic opacity are examined in masked (Experiment 1) and delayed priming (Experiment 2). Significant masked priming was observed for pairs that shared orthography, irrespective of whether they shared meaning (mania/mana, omania/mothero). Delayed priming was observed for pairs that were semantically related, irrespective of orthographic opacity (poto/pino, odrink/I drinko). The results are discussed in terms of theories of morphological processing in visual word recognition.