The role of semantic interpretability and syntactic legality in complex nonword recognition

This study explored the role of semantic interpretability and syntactic legality on complex nonword recognition. A rating experiment tested the correlation between these two linguistic factors by asking participants to rate the interpretability of legal and illegal nonwords made up of stem-suffix combinations. Results showed that these two factors are highly correlated. In two further lexical decision experiments (unprimed lexical decision in Experiment 2 and masked primed lexical decision in Experiment 3), we carefully dissociated interpretability and legality by comparing four types of nonwords: high-interpretability syntactically legal, high-interpretability syntactically illegal, low-interpretability syntactically legal, and low-interpretability syntactically illegal nonwords. To test whether or not the activation of embedded stems was modulated by their morpho-semantic and morpho-syntactic context, all complex nonwords were compared against a matched non-stem control. A significant effect of stem status was found in Experiments 2 and 3, providing evidence for the important role of embedded stems in complex nonword recognition. Moreover, a significant effect of interpretability was found only in the unprimed lexical decision (Experiment 2), but not in masked priming (Experiment 3), suggesting that semantics does not influence complex word recognition until participants have enough time to thoroughly process the nonword. No effect of syntactic legality was found in either experiment. These results highlight the independent roles of semantic interpretability and syntactic legality in visual nonword recognition, supporting an initial semantically blind stage in morphological parsing.