Automatic learning of morphology-based associations in Dutch

The aim of this research was to evaluate whether Dutch native speakers process information at the morphological level in an automatic and unconscious way. Participants were presented with stimuli within a masked priming paradigm followed by a lexical decision task. The answer on the lexical decision task could be predicted by the preceding stimulus (presence or absence of past tense morphology). Crucially, only morphological, but not semantic or orthographic information was needed in order to learn the association. Results showed that subjects were indeed able to learn the association between morphological information and the appropriate response. Furthermore, the short presentation time of the stimuli and the masked presentation indicated that the processing of morphological information must have occurred early in word processing, and probably in an automatic and unconscious fashion.