We report two experiments that investigated whether phonological and/or orthographic shifts in a base word interfere with morphological processing by French 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders and adults (as a control group) along the time course of visual word recognition. In both experiments, prime-target pairs shared four possible relationships:…

A commonly shared assumption in the field of visual-word recognition is that retinotopic representations are rapidly converted into abstract representations. Here we examine the role of visual form vs. abstract representations during the early stages of word processing--as measured by masked priming--in young children (3rd and 6th Graders) and…