Morpheme Position Coding in Reading Development

诸如德语或意大利语的形态复杂语言的读者经常面临阅读由多个词素组成的单词的任务（即，read+able，book+worm）.熟练的读者会自动将这些词分解成它们的组成语素，以便更快地掌握整个词。这就需要词素的精确表示。词素在单词中的可能位置信息也有助于单词识别：前缀只出现在单词的首字母（re+read），后缀只出现在单词的尾字母（read+able），词干既出现在单词的首字母，又出现在单词的尾字母（book+worm）。目前尚不清楚儿童是否已经从这种特定位置的信息中受益。在德语中，儿童在阅读发展过程中使用后缀比前缀更早。位置编码可能是这种发展轨迹的一个潜在原因。这一轨迹是否适用于其他形态丰富的语言，以及什么样的表征和机制负责这将被调查的阅读收购在意大利语。拟议的研究项目旨在阐明是否以及如何信息词素的位置是由发展中国家的读者在有效的视觉单词识别。这一结果为深入了解形态丰富的语言中阅读发展的认知机制提供了新的视角。

Readers of morphologically complex languages, such as German or Italian, are often confronted with the task of reading words that are composed of multiple morphemes (i.e., read+able, book+worm). Skilled readers automatically decompose such words into their constituent morphemes in order to grasp the whole word more quickly. This requires exact representations of morphemes. Information about possible positions of the morphemes within a word additionally facilitate word recognition: prefixes only occur wordinitial (re+read), suffixes only wordfinal (read+able), and stems both wordinitial and –final (book+worm). It is unknown, whether children already benefit from this kind of position-specific information. In German, children use suffixes earlier for word recognition in the course of reading development than prefixes. Position coding can be a potential reason for this developmental trajectory. Whether this trajectory pertains to other morphologically rich languages and what kind of representations and mechanisms are responsible for this will be investigated for reading acquisition in Italian. The proposed research project aims at shedding light on whether and how information about morpheme position is used by developing readers in efficient visual word recognition. The results promise new insights into the cognitive mechanisms involved in reading development in morphologically rich languages.