Morphological Processing of Complex Words in Turkish

The main objective of this study is to examine how native speakers of Turkish process morphologically complex words when they are presented with masked primes. The present paper also seeks to find out whether semantics and/or orthography play a role in the early stages of morphological processing. A masked priming visual word recognition experiment was conducted with 44 Turkish speakers. Based on the accuracy rates and reaction times of the participants, this study aimed to figure out the organization of the mental lexicon. The results showed statistically significant priming effects for transparent items while no significant priming was revealed for the opaque and form items. These results replicate earlier studies and indicate that native speakers of Turkish decompose inflectionally and derivationally complex words in the early stages of visual word recognition. Moreover, the results also suggest that early morphological processing is blind to orthographic properties.