Morphological priming with French verbs: the neglected role of orthographie neighbourhood

Résumé En

The present study used the masked priming paradigm to examine effects of morphologically related primes on the recognition of infinitive forms of French regular verbs, while varying the level of neighbourhood density. Morphologicaleffects were assessed relative to form-related control primes, while an incremental priming technique was used . Neighbourhood density was found to affect the presence or absence of morphological facilitation, since highneighbourhood density inflections failed to prime their base form, contrariwise to low neighbourhood size verb category. These results are interpreted within an interactive activation model of morphological representation, and more importantly, they put forward a possible explanation for some discrepant results in the literature.