Auditory priming of pseudo-suffixed words

We present results from two auditory experiments that examine priming effects for pseudo-derived pairs of words (e.g., corner-corn), as compared to morphologically, phonologically, and semantically related pairs. Previous work shows facilitation for pseudo-derived pairs in a visual masked priming paradigm; our Experiment 1 presents the novel finding that these effects are also found in auditory priming, with no consistent difference between pseudo-derived and phonologically-related pairs. Experiment 2 introduces an intervener between primes and targets to further probe the nature of the facilitation in pseudo-derived pairs. Implications for theories of morphological processing and spoken-word recognition are discussed.