Silent morphological information in a word’s spelling also affects natural reading behavior

Previous research suggests that, when performing experimental tasks, readers rely on the morphological information incorporated in a word’s spelling even if this information is not reflected in the word’s pronunciation. We investigated whether readers do so as well when they read text for comprehension under more natural conditions, that is, when participants read tweets, which were not composed for experimentation, and when they can read and skip words in the order they would like to. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether participants who read for comprehension suffer from reading a homophone of the intended word, which differs from the intended word in the morphological information in the spelling. Experiment 1 focused on Dutch homophone pairs of the first and the third person singular present tense, for which previous studies have shown that confusion of the forms leads to longer self-paced reading times. Experiment 2 focused on Dutch homophone pairs of the third person singular present tense and the past participle, for which several studies could not find that readers rely on the silent morphological information in the spelling. For both pairs of homophones, we found that reading is delayed by the incorrect homophone. This shows that, also during more naturalistic reading conditions, readers process words not only by phonological encoding, but also by directly extracting morphological information from the spelling. A proper orthographic representation of morphologically complex words is thus important for the reading of natural texts.