2 | Roberto Petrosino

Stages In Lexical Decision: Frequency Attenuation In Masked Repetition Priming Is Insensitive To Prime Duration

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Accepted for publication on Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience in November 2025.

This study investigates the controversial Frequency Attenuation Effect (FAE), examining whether masked repetition priming is sensitive to word frequency. Early findings suggesting no interaction have been recently contradicted. Across two largescale experiments (N>2,600), we show that the FAE does occur in masked conditions, but its magnitude is insensitive to prime duration. This constitutes a challenge to single-stage models of word recognition. We argue that only a two-stage decisionmaking framework can accommodate this pattern. We propose that masked repetition and prime duration influence an early, automatic stage, whereas frequency flexibly affects a later processing stage. Distributional analyses of reaction times support these conclusions. We tentatively suggest that the FAE is primarily a consequence of a later decision stage, driven by a mechanism that is selectively engaged for challenging stimuli, like low-frequency words. These results help strongly constrain theoretical models of lexical access.

Asymmetries in the stem and suffix masked priming response in a large-scale online study

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Models of visual word processing incorporate morphological decomposition as a step in the recognition process, but they vary as to when this step happens, and what kind of information is used in it. In particular, the affix stripping model proposes that words are accessed through their stems, after affixes are automatically stripped off. This dichotomy between stems and affixes seems to be mirrored in masked priming. Masked stem priming is quite robust and comparable to masked repetition priming, whereas masked affix priming is often null, or very small. However, the literature on masked affix priming is much smaller than the one on masked stem priming. This study investigates the stem vs suffix asymmetry in masked priming by running an online experiment with a large sample size (N=161) to ensure higher statistical power. For comparison and validation, the same experiment was also conducted in a standard lab setting. In addition, we ran a follow-up experiment with two additional suffix priming conditions with an even larger sample size (N=400) to assess the influence of orthographic and strategic confounds. The three experiments show significant stem priming, but null or very small suffix priming, thus supporting the asymmetry between stem activation and affix stripping.

Root-adjacent exponence in the Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin verbal systems

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Proto-Indo-European verbal morphology is generally described as consisting of at least a “thematic” and an “athematic” conjugations, which differ in whether or not a fixed vocalic piece adjacent to the root (traditionally known as “thematic vowel”) is present. This paper investigates the behavior of the outcomes of the thematic vowels in three ancient Indo-European languages: Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin. We show that, on the one hand, Latin thematic vowels are typically “ornamental”, in that they lack any morpho-syntactico-semantic information, and are used exclusively for classification purposes; on the other hand, Sanskrit and Ancient Greek thematic vowels are fully functional, in that they expone (at least) aspectual information. We argue for a diachronic account of such differential treatment of thematicity across the three languages, whereby the original functionality of such pieces, albeit fully preserved in Sanskrit, was gradually lost over time, and finally gave rise to the Latin verbal ornamental system.