Morpheme Position Coding in Reading Development

语素复杂语言的读者，如德语或意大利语，经常面临着阅读由多个语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。这需要语素的精确表示。关于词素在单词中的可能位置的信息还有助于单词识别：前缀只出现在wordinal (re+read)，后缀只出现在wordfinal (read+able)，词根同时出现在wordinal和-final （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地识别单词。位置编码可能是这种发展轨迹的潜在原因。这一轨迹是否适用于其他词法丰富的语言，以及这是什么样的表征和机制导致的，将在意大利语阅读习得中进行研究。本研究旨在揭示语素位置信息是否以及如何被发展中的读者用于有效的视觉词识别。研究结果为研究词形丰富的语言中阅读发展的认知机制提供了新的见解。

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.