Perception, as you make it.

The main question that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) pose is whether "what and how we see is functionally independent from what and how we think, know, desire, act, and so forth" (sect. 2, para. 1). We synthesize a collection of concerns from an interdisciplinary set of coauthors regarding F&S's assumptions and appeals to intuition, resulting in their treatment of visual perception as context-free.

Must analysis of meaning follow analysis of form? A time course analysis.

Many models of word recognition assume that processing proceeds sequentially from analysis of form to analysis of meaning. In the context of morphological processing, this implies that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings. Some interpret the apparent absence of differences in recognition latencies to targets (SNEAK) in form and semantically similar (sneaky-SNEAK) and in form similar and semantically dissimilar (sneaker-SNEAK) prime contexts at a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 48 ms as consistent with this claim. To determine the time course over which degree of semantic similarity between morphologically structured primes and their targets influences recognition in the forward masked priming variant of the lexical decision paradigm, we compared facilitation for the same targets after semantically similar and dissimilar primes across a range of SOAs (34-100 ms). The effect of shared semantics on recognition latency increased linearly with SOA when long SOAs were intermixed (Experiments 1A and 1B) and latencies were significantly faster after semantically similar than dissimilar primes at homogeneous SOAs of 48 ms (Experiment 2) and 34 ms (Experiment 3). Results limit the scope of form-then-semantics models of recognition and demonstrate that semantics influences even the very early stages of recognition. Finally, once general performance across trials has been accounted for, we fail to provide evidence for individual differences in morphological processing that can be linked to measures of reading proficiency.

Morphological processing: a comparison between free and bound stem facilitation.

Linguists distinguish between words formed from free stems (e.g., actor: act) and those formed from bound stems (e.g., spectator: spect). In a forward masked priming task, we observed significant morphological facilitation for prime-target pairs that shared either a free (e.g., deform-CONFORM) or a bound (e.g., revive-SURVIVE) stem. Relative to an unrelated baseline, magnitudes of facilitation for free (e.g., form) and bound (e.g., vive) stems were significant and comparable, but relative to an orthographic baseline free stem facilitation was greater than bound stem facilitation. In addition, the magnitude of bound (but not free) stem morphological facilitation correlated with the number of morphological relatives.

Morphological analysis by child readers as revealed by the fragment completion task.

Ten-year-old children performed a fragment completion task. Target fragments (e.g., T_ _N) were preceded by four types of study conditions. The identity condition consisted of the target (TURN). Themorphological condition included a related form (TURNED). The orthographic condition consisted of morphologically unrelated words (e.g., TURNIP). Finally, no similar word was presented in the study phase of the no-prime condition. Morphological relatives included orthographically transparent (TURNED-TURN) and orthographically opaque (RIDDEN-RIDE) forms. The results indicated that performance of child readers on the fragment completion task was sensitive to morphological relationships. Completion rates following opaque, as well as transparent, morphological relatives were significantly greater than those following orthographically similar forms. In sum, the fragment completion task provides a viable new tool for examining morphological processing in children and for differentiating morphological effects from effects of similar form.

Multidimensional data visualization.

Historically, data visualization has been limited primarily to two dimensions (e.g., histograms or scatter plots). Available software packages (e.g., Data Desk 6.1, MatLab 6.1, SAS-JMP 4.04, SPSS 10.0) are capable of producing three-dimensional scatter plots with (varying degrees of) user interactivity. We constructed our own data visualization application with the Visualization Toolkit (Schroeder, Martin, & Lorensen, 1998) and Tcl/Tk to display multivariate data through the application of glyphs (Ware, 2000). A glyph is a visual object onto which many data parameters may be mapped, each with a different visual attribute (e.g., size or color). We used our Multi-Dimensional data Viewer to explore data from several psycholinguistic experiments. The graphical interface provides flexibility when users dynamically explore the multidimensional image rendered from raw experimental data. We highlight advantages of multidimensional data visualization and consider some potential limitations.

The processing and representation of Dutch and English compounds: peripheral morphological and central orthographic effects.

In this study, we use the association between various measures of the morphological family and decision latencies to reveal the way in which the components of Dutch and English compounds are processed. The results show that for constituents of concatenated compounds in both languages, a position-related token count of the morphological family plays a role, whereas English open compounds show an effect of a type count, similar to the effect of family size for simplex words. When Dutch compounds are written with an artificial space, they reveal no effect of type count, which shows that the differential effect for the English open compounds is not superficial. The final experiment provides converging evidence for the lexical consequences of the space in English compounds. Decision latencies for English simplex words are better predicted from counts of the morphological family that include concatenated and hyphenated but not open family members.