Morpheme Position Coding in Reading Development

德语或意大利语等形态复杂语言的读者经常面临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单词分解成它们的构成语素，以便更快地掌握整个单词。这需要语素的精确表示。有关词素在单词中的可能位置的信息还有助于单词识别：前缀只出现在单词开头(re+Read)，后缀只出现在单词结尾(Read+able)，词干既出现在单词开头，也出现在词尾(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比前缀更早地使用后缀进行单词识别。位置编码可能是这种发展轨迹的一个潜在原因。这一轨迹是否与其他形态丰富的语言有关，以及是什么表征和机制导致的，将被用来研究意大利语的阅读习得。该研究项目旨在揭示发展中的读者是否以及如何利用语素位置信息进行高效的视觉单词识别。这一研究结果为理解形态丰富的语言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.