Towards a comprehensive understanding of reading

Reading is an activity in which humans routinely engage in on an everyday basis. It is thus not surprising that the question of how we identify and process words has been one of the central interests of psycholinguistic research in the past decades. Indeed, the science of reading has progressed enormously in this time, and we have gained important insights into visual word identification. However, our current understanding of word identification is difficult to extend to text reading—both experiments and theories focus primarily, if not exclusively, on out-of-context individual words. Instead, text reading has been extensively explored through the models of eye movement control in reading. However, their focus lies primarily on the decision of when to move the eyes to the next word and the nature of attention allocation, while they tend to stay clear of the lexical dynamics, described in models of single word processing. While both these fields importantly advanced our knowledge, the entire complexity of reading process surely cannot be addressed while they are kept in isolation. Recently, a shift towards a more integrated approach, joining the findings of both fields, has started to emerge. At the same time, the constant development of new techniques now allows us to address reading under more integrated and natural experimental conditions. We make use of these in the present thesis, where we follow the path from the study of words in isolation towards more ecologically valid study of word processing during sentence reading. Throughout the present work, we approach the reading research in three steps. We start from the individual word processing—in chapter 2, we introduce a masked morphological priming study, in which we address the question of existence of stem and inflectional suffix priming. Following, we move on towards a more integrated approach of visual word identification and text reading—in chapter 3, we study cross-word semantic and morphological priming within sentences in a natural reading, eye tracking experiment. Finally, we try to apply this integrated approach to the study of neural signatures during natural reading—in chapter 4, we use the same cross-word semantic and morphological priming paradigm as in the previous chapter, but we introduce it in a natural sentence reading study in which we simultaneously record the eye movements and electroencephalogram. Taken together, the present work presents three different approaches to the study of morphological and lexical-semantic priming. Throughout these studies, no evidence in support of (inflectional) morphological priming was observed, while solid effect of lexical-semantic priming was observed both in words in isolation, as also in a natural sentence reading. With this, our work indicates that inflectional morphemes behave differently from stems and derivational morphemes in complex word recognition.